Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 May 1878 — Parallels for the Phonograph. [ARTICLE]

Parallels for the Phonograph.

It is quite common to try to assist our comprehension of the marvelous nature of the most splendid feats of scientific invention, by comparing them with something equivalent s the wildest excursions of poetical fancy, as, for instance, after submarine telegraphy had been accomplished everybody was told how much it surpassed the boast of Shakespeare's Ariel that he could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. It is a curious illustration of the estimate put on the phonograph that a resort is had, not to the poets, but to Baron Munchausen, for a parallel. The truth in this case is so astonishing, it flies so far beyond the bounds of credibilitv, as to seem stranger than the bold fictions of that noted raconteur. The Pall Mall Gazette says the phonograph “must have already reminded many persons of those frozen notes in Baron Munchausen’s horn that became audible music when the thaw et in.”

This comparison is apt, but it is by no means the happiest that might have been chosen. One of Addison’s humorous papers in the Tattler is altogether more illustrative, and the fact that it did not occur to a writer in so scholarly a journal as the Pall Mall Gazette shows into what neglect the classics of Queen Anne’s reign have fallen in our age. In the amusing fiction alluded to Addison professed to have come in possession of an unpublished journal of Sir John Mandeville, from which he published an extract. Mandeville’s English ship, together with a Dutch ana French ship, being caught in the Polar regions and compelled to winter in Nova Zembla, the crews built huts of turf and amused themselves as best they could. A period of intense cold coming on they found themselves unable to be heard, although each sailor seemed to himself to talk as well as ever. This terra of utter silence had continued for several weeks, when with s turn of the wind there came a thaw and the frozen words began to melt. First a crackling of consonants over their heads, then a breeze of whispers, afterward syllables and short words, and at length as the thaw progressed entire sentences and whole conversations were let loose, until all the congealed words were heard precisely as they would have been at the proper time if they had not been frozen by the air the moment they passed the lips of the speakers. Addison, or rather the fiction journal of Sir John Mandeville, repeats many iudicrous and diverting specimens, among them the oaths and curses of the boatswain, who took the opportunity of silence to free his mind respecting the Captain and got strappadoed when his curses thawed out, with equally amusing scenes among the crews of the Dutch and French ships. Now the phonograph surpasses this wild freak of humorous invention. It catches p.nd imprisons words and whole conversations and songs, as the air of the frigid zone was supposed to do, holds them for any length of time, and gives them back as faithfully as the frozen air did the ejaculations of Sir John Mandeville’s sailors in memory of their distant sweethearts in Wapping, as faithfully as the groans of the Polar bear were made audible three weeks after its flesh had been pickled in the meat barrel. —New York, Herald.