EDISON OUTDONE.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 3, Issue 234, 15 October 1878, Page 3

EDISON OUTDONE.

(Richmond (Vα.) Staie.)

Professor Wuffix, the eniment inventor, honored the State with a visit this morning. A. reporter, noted for his -seiubility, engaged him in. conversation. The Professor listened very patiently, but at length casually placed his left hand on the reporter's knee. The flow of talk at once moderated, and the Professor, availing himself of the opportunity placed his right hand on the other knee. Within two seconds the reporter was fast asleep. " How was it done •?" asked the astonished editor, who witnessed the performance. " Come this way and I will show you," said Mr Wuffix. Stepping into a private room, he threw yp his coat tails and disclosed between his shoulder blades what appeared to be a 99 cent dock. " That," said he, " is a battery, the wires of which extend under my coatsleeves to the palm of my' hands, as you see, , ' showing the ends of the wires in hir, hands. ' ; These ends, the electrodes or positive and negative poles of the battery, are saturated (see here the little sponges) with a solution of double-

distilled strychnine and morphine. The former produces paralysis of the tongue, the latter induces sleep, and that is the whole instrument. It is the reverse of the phonograph, the one being a talking machine, the other a machine to stop talk." " And what is it g©od for ?" "It is too early yet to say what the ultimate results of it may be, though I regard it as the|greatest of all my inventions ; but we may already conceive several benign purposes which it will subserve. / For example,what;" " Let us suppose," said the learned Professor, " that the head of the family so far forgets himself as to imagine that there is immediate need of him down town the moment he swallows his breakfast—in other words, that his buisness is of importance, and demands attention. The being whom he adores, under the stimulus of coffee, begins to stream in ideas or their substitute called words—" " Aha ? ", said the editor, " I see." , -?' " Placing both hands on her shoulders I bestows a satilte on her radiant and unsuspecting brow, and by the time she !is fairly awake he is comfortably quartered in his counting-house. " Just so. Can you mention another case ?" " On those trying occasions, when, in the hall way of any residence, the visiting female and the female visited begin to indulge in those simultaneous and interminable vocal interchanges with which all are unhappily too familiar, the visiting male and the male visited have it in their power, by secret co-operation, to bring about as it were an abrupt but at the same time unsuspected, harmless, and pleasureable suspension of pourparlers, and thus to escape those unseemly and quickly regretted explosions ■'of irrascibility to which the males, both fvisitihg and visited, and too often subject, so soon as they are alone with the respective partakers of their matrimonial fejicityl" '^X^Ppctly ! " exclaimed our editor, jfjssfc'what name do you propose for your instrument ? technical name will be the 'PhonoliPii> QJr ;jj>ound Consumer,' but it will winle rtyDe' known as the ' Husband's SP&gtili will it be cheap ?" Wl-It* will be within the reach even of j ' l journalist." tff- Thft answer being entirely satisfactory, "Hlio Professor was tired out and departed.