People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1893 — CHINESE AND THE PHONOGRAPH [ARTICLE]

CHINESE AND THE PHONOGRAPH

They Start In With the Idea That It Contains a Cannon Flreeraeker. Did you ever see a Chinaman try a phonograph? No? Then you have missed one of the beat things this world has to offer. At the beginning the Chinaman hasn’t an all-abiding confidence in the phonograph. His experience in this country hasn’t been such as to give him any too much confidence in anything that has the slightest appearance of mystery about it He tries it, if he can be induced to try it at all, with the air of a man who thinks that it is all a put up job and that the instrument contains a cannon firecracker that will explode at the proper moment and wreck one side of his face. At least that seemed to be the idea of a Chinaman who tried one of the phonographs on the Midway Plaisance at the world’s fair. He waited until he had seen some Americans try it before he could be induced to go near it and even then he had grave doubts. He had a firm grip on the ear pieces as he put them in his ears, preparing to yank them out promptly if anything exploded. There was a solemn expression on his face, too, as if he was preparing to attend his own funeral.

Then he got the strains of “Papa Won’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow,” or something similar, and he grinned. His eyes stuck out and the proportions of the grin increased. He began nodding his head and shuffling his feet. His companions seemed to think he was going crazy. They all began talking at him at once. The head kept going in time to the music as if it were set on a pivot, and the play of his features was a whole show in itself. When the air was finished there was an animated discussion among all the Chinamen in the party, and then each I in turn tried it, each showing the same J lack of confidence in the beginning that 1 the first had. Then they moved to another phonograph and got a new tune. The last seen of them they were moving steadily down the Plaisance expending their cash in trying all the phonographs they came to.—Chicago Tribune.