Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 June 1878 — THE MICROPHONE. [ARTICLE]

THE MICROPHONE.

A New Wonder Invented In England That Giwea the Telephone the Voice of Stentor. [From the New York Tribune.] We appear to be only at the beginning of discoveries in the line of the telephone and phonograph. An entirely new field of science has been opened; the limits cannot even be guessed. An instrument has been devised that bears a relation to our ■ capacity for hearing similar to that which the microscope or telescope does for vision. The new device magnifies sound. It is appropriately called the microphone. By its means sounds so faint that they have never before been heard by human ears may be made of any degree of loudness. A feather’s edge brushed over the sounding board of this instrument has been made to crash on the ears of the listeners. The touoh of the tip of a camel’shair brush was the occasion of a “crackling noise, of which the intensity was almost painful to the ear.” The faintest whisper of the human voi<*e can be reproduced in the loudest tones. “The maiden's sigh may roar like the cataract of Niagara/’ Prof. D. E. Hughes has given a full account of the microphone to the Royal Society of London, and described the steps by which he was led to the invention. He is most widely known in London as the inventor of the type-printing telegraph instrument, which is in general use in that country. Although he is an accomplished electrician, the apparatus which he has employed for his new experiments is of the simplest character and most trifling cost. With it he has made the footsteps of a house-fly distinctly audible; and all these sounds, after being intensified, are transmitted to any needful distance by the ordinary telephone.

The philosophy of the new invention is more difficult to explain than is the telephone itself. The discovery has been made by Prof. Hughes that the vibrations of sound are reproduced with the greatest delicacy and increased force by certain materials interposed in an electric circuit. The reproduced sounds gain their increase of power, doubtless, at the expense of the current. After a large number of experiments he gives the preference to carbon for this purpose—especially to pieces of charcoal that have been heated to whiteness and then plunged into mercury. These pieces, in one of his experiments, he placed in a glass tube, and brought a pressure upon them that squeezed their ends together. This apparatus was made part of a closed electric circuit cf three small cups. A Bell telephone was then introduced into the circuit, and the whole thing was complete. All that was necessary to do was to talk to the tube, even at a respectful distance from it, and the telephone repeated the sound, at any distance yet tried, with a loudness dependent only on the pressure. This disposes at once of the fear that the telephone was nearing the end of its usefulness as an instrument for conveying speech. It is only at the beginning. With such means there will be no obstacle to reporting a public speaker or singer; no difficulty, in fact, in hearing whispers inaudible to unassisted ears. All that has ever been imagined as among the possibilities of the phonograph or the telephone seems now certain to be outdone. Since the falling of a pin can now be heard at the distance of 100 miles, little will be needed to realize Hood’s metaphor that Silence herself may be making a row.