Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1878 — Edison’s Talking Machine. [ARTICLE]

Edison’s Talking Machine.

The traveling public will be joyful at the announcement that the phonograph can be applied to the whistles erf locomotives ana roar out the names of the stations so loudly as to be heard by every passenger, and by all the country round. No more bewilderment from the brakeman’s attempt to give the names of American towns in a compound of broken Choctaw and the speech of primeval monkeys. That part of his occupation in which he appears to take fiendish delight is gone. Probably the utterance of the phonotype on so large a scale will not be of a soothing nature; but if they are intelligible we can bear them. Mr. Edison calls the machine when applied to steam whistles the airophone. The inventor has received by cable offers from England of large sums in hand and half the profit of its introduction into that country. His account of the manner in which he discovered the principle of this last scientific wonder is interesting. “ I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone when the vibrations of the voice sent the fine steel point into my finger. That set me to thinking. If I could record the actions of the point, and send the point over the same surface afterward, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk. I tried the experiment first on a strip of telegraph paper, and found that the point made an alphabet I shouted the words ‘ Halloo ! halloo ! ’ into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel point, and heard a faint * Halloo 1 halloo ! ’ in return. I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants instructions, telling them what I had discovered. They laughed at me. I bet fifteen cigars with Adams here (Adams was lying on a table, listening to the conversation) that the thing would work the first time without a break, and won them. I bet $2 with the man who made the machine, and won them also. That’s the whole story. The discovery came through the pricking of the finger. ”