PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON EDISON'S TELEPHONE.

Globe, Volume XXI, Issue 1690, 21 July 1879, Page 3

PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON EDISON'S TELEPHONE.

At the Society of Arts last evening', Professor Tyndall occupying the chair, Mr C. W. Cooke road a paper upon Edison's electrochemical or loud-speaking telephone, before a crowded meeting of ladies and gentlemen. The early beginnings of the telephone, as shown in the inventions of Reis, Varley, La Cour, and others within the last twenty years, having been briefly sketched in his essay, the lecturer came to yet more recent times, and described at somewhat greater length the apparatus constructed by Professor Graham Bell. Coming next to the subject immediately in hand, he proceeded to explain in minute detail the carbon telephone and the electro-chemical telephone of Mr Edison. The lesture, which was almost purely technical in character, was illustrated with a number of interesting diagrams and electrical and mechanical experiments. Among the latter was included the transmission of different sounds through an electro-chemical telephone from a distant part of the building through a length of wire, equal, it wai Btated, to a resistance of twenty miles. The tones of a cornet were clearly audible through this medium throughout the hall, as were also those of the human voice, although the latter had acquired a peculiar nasal quality in transmission. In proposing the vote of thanks to Mr Cooke for his paper, Professor Tyndall said that he had listened to it throughout with the greatest interest, and he had been struck, not only with the deep knowledge of the subject displayed in it, but also with its great felicity of expression. The audience, he thought, must have felt the reading to be a great strain upon their attention ; but the lecturer had merely opened up the way, and they must prosecute their study of the subject for themselves, for which purpose they could not do better than study the paper to which they had listened. He thought it due to Mr Edison to Bay that that gentleman was very desirous that people in England should be aware that he did not look upon his instrument as a perfect one. The experiments which had just been made, Professor Tyndall said, did an injustice to the Edison telephone, which, he further stated, he had tested with the source of sound in Piccadilly-circus and the receiver at the Royal Institution in Albemarle street, with results greatly superior to thoße which had just been obtained. However, the results already achieved were so far remarkable that they would have been pronounced impossible by ■cientiflc men not very long ago. There was no action which had been made known in the course of the development of the telephone which men of science would not at one time have pronounced possible in theory but impossible of realisation, and a mere dream. It was through experimental tact alone that such great things had been brought about._ With regard to the fact, incidentally mentioned by Mr Cooke, that Mr Graham Bell and Mr Elisha Gray had applied for a patent for sound-transmitting contrivances of similar character on the very same day of the same year, Professor Tyndall said that curiously enough such ideas frequently came in groups. So far back as the time of Newton a great discovery emerged simultaneously from the biains of Newton and Leibnitz, and so it was with the doctrine of the origin of species, which had occurred at the same time to Darwin and Wallace. These facts indeed were illustrated throughout the whole march of science. Scientific thought reached a certain level to which the foremost pioneers had attained, and at about the same period those pioneers often reached the same results.