THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC WONDER.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5345, 15 May 1878, Page 3

THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC WONDER.

(From the Spectator.) The telephone is the wonder of the day, but among the inventions to which the investigation of this subject has given rise is one of a kind which to us—accustomed as we now are to the electric telegraph—appears still more marvellous than even the telephone itself, one which would enable us to talk further into the future thahthe telephone will ever enable us to talk into space. Every one remembers the story of Baron Munchausen hearing the words which had been frozen during the severe' cold melting into speech again, so that all the babble of a past day came floating about his ears. Well, that extravagant piece of nonsense appears to have been realised by modern science, though not precisely by Baron Munchausen’s suggested method. Professor Barrett’s interesting, lectures on the telephone contained an account of the invention we refer to, which might strictly be called a telephone in the timesense, since it will so reproduce the tone of words once spoken as to enable ahose who take the proper measures to reel them off again in the very same voice as that of the speaker, months—and we may soon, perhaps, b able to say years—alter the speaker himself is dead. We do not prelend to describe the talking phonograph minutely, but the principle of it is this: A vibrating metal diaphragm is so arranged as to vibrate in unison with the voice of the speaker, who must be near it, and direct his voice towards it. In connection with this metal diaphragm is a pointer, so adjusted as to dot a piece of tinfoil placed spirally on a revolving drum, with every vibration of the diaphragm. The rate at which the drum revolves must be carefully noted, for in retranslating the effect of the dots on the tinfoil into the vi ration of the pointer attached to another vibrating plate, as the drum revolves past it, so as to reproduce in these new plate-vibrations the sound of the original voice,—if the revolution were faster than before, the same words would be heard, but in a higher key; while if it were slower, the same words would be heard, but in a lower key. It is, then, quite possible to keep this register of a speech as long as the tinfoil will last without being injured by oxidisation. And at present that seems to be only for a few mouths. Still it is quite conceivable even now that five or six months after a speech had been uttered you should hear it reeled off, as it were, from the tinfoil register, by the help of the revolving drum, and a new pointer, pressed by a gentle spring against the tinfoil, so as to enter the dotted apertures previously made in it and excite the old vibration, as it so enters them, in a new vibrating plate, so as to perfect reproduction both in voice and expression of the words in the original sentence, and indeed so as to make an ignorant person believe the same lips were repeating what they had uttered mouths ago, in the very same manner and with the same cadence. In this way you may literally bottle a speech'and reproduce it months hence ; nor is there anything absurd in principle in the joke of Punch’s last Comic Almanac, which suggested the bottling of various operatic performances: and taming on the various taps at given signals. It is even scientifically conceivable—we do hot say that it is very probable—that after this fashion the nineteenth century may talk to the twenty-ninth, and be heard in the very words and cadences of a thousand years ago —that a speech of Mr. Gladstone’s, for example, or of Hr. Carlyle’s, or of Mr. Biggar’s should be thus registered on some more permanent equivalent for the tinfoil, and the rate of the revolution of the drum be carefully noted as the process takes place, so that when after a thousand years have elapsed, and when a generation of men probably far more different from ourselves than we are from the Saxons of Alfred’s time are living here, this voice from the far-away past may be heard, reiterating counsels the very occasion of which is forgotten, or droning out complaints and accusations, the irrelevance of which shall then seem even greater, if that be possible, than It seems to us now. Talk of the urns of your ancestors’ ashes the drums of their ancestors will be our posterity’s most affecting mode of recalling their day. We might conceive every house furnished" with such drums and vibrating plates, each stored with some speech, the speaker of which has long since been dead, and the anniversary of birth or death solemnised by the liberation of some one cf such speeches from its long entombment At the accession of each new monarch, we might have a chosen assembly called together to hear the most momentous speech from the throne ever delivered by the most remarkable of his predecessors, since the epoch whan this method of preserving speech was first inven’ed, —a Pope Leo XXL, for instance, surrounded by hi■* Cardinals, inclining his ear to the vibrating plate, from which should proceed the address uttered by Pin Nono to his last Consistory, or a Hohenzollern of the twenty-first century summoning his Cabinet to hear, for the third or fourth rehearsal, it may be, the precise words of the last assault directed against the See of Roms by the great Prince Bismarck. But, to turn from the more whimsical aspects of this very curious discovery to its more impressive aspects, certainly nothing of modern in mention has proved so extrardinary an illustration of the subjective character of space-and-time distinctions as these two kinds of telephones—the telephone which enables a man to speak at one point and be heard nt another, hundreds of miles distant, and the still more curious telephone which enables a man to speak at one point of time and be heard when not only bis name, but even bis nation, it may be, is forgotten. Some thirty years ago or more a very curious little book was published, entitled “The Stars and the Earth,” in which it was shown how, if an eye could be imagined riding on a ray of light reflected from an opening flower and passing on it thiough endless space and time, such an eye would always see that flower as it was in the same momentary phase of opening in which it appeared at the time that ray was first reflected from It, and would so see it to all eternity, whereas if it travelled the least bit faster, so as to overtake— say in a’thousand years —the ray which left the flowei a minute sooner, that eye would be reading backwards the change which wq bco accomplished in a minute, but would have it spread and subdivided over the period of a thousand years. In the same way, if aneyo cpuld be imagined travelling in the direction of the same ray of light, hut rather slower, so as to fall behind it by a minute in ,a thousand years, then it would see the next minute, instead, of .the..previous

minute, of that opening blossom’s history, stretched out to the length of a thousand years. All this was intended to illustrate the extremely subjective character of the nature nf t me, and to prove that it only vequiv. s us to imagine a different relation between onr eyes and the light reflected from any object, to make a thousand years appear as one day, and one day as a thousand years. For of course, if the retina in question were conceived as travelling from the earth, so rapidly that in a minute’s tune it could overtake the ray which left the earth a thousand years ago, then, for that one point of space, such a retina would travel in as minute over the history of a thousand years. Well, that was hut an imaginative illustration of the subjective character of the meaning of time. But here is a real illustration of it which we may all witness. It may happen even iu the lifetime of living men that real con vernations will be carried on between the most di-cant points which beings with earthly bodies can manage to reach, and it may happen, too, also in the lifetime of living men, that the perfect semblance of the voice of o >e who died during a man's infancy may vibrate in his ear, and repeat his own very words, in his young contemporary's old age. The future, indeed, may hear more wonderful things still. It may hear the voices of every century from and after the nineteenth, though of none before it, reproduced ages hence. The problems which we discuss, so hotly as to the mode in which the Greeks and Homans spoke their laugn <ge may have no existence iu relation to the pronunciation of words in any age later than this, for the actual sound of every existing provincial dialect may be reproduced literally, and this for ears to which not only such dialects, hut the most classical forms of the most classical languages of our day, will have become quite obsolete. The thirtieth century may hear the orations of a Welsh Eisteddfod and the broad clamor of a Yorkshire horse-fair, in the very accents of our, own time. Surely, nothing could be more impressive as a lesson on the undue importance which we attach to time. “Wo have heard with ott» ears, and our fathers, have told us,” may iu future apply not merely to the fathers we have seen, but to the forefathers wo have never seen. The distinction between dead and living languages, indeed, may thus bo iu great measure obliterated. The ancient world,—ancient, that is, to our posterity,—may be, —to the ear, at least, and to the eye also, so far as photography can make it so, —present and, living still. Men may live, as it were in the I9th century and iu the 29th at the same time, belonging indeed to the 29th, but hearing auricular confessions communicated straight from the 19th. Will a man ; so situated;, have; any notion like that which we attach to the irrecoverable “ past ?” Will he not live in a sort of focus of all spaces and all times, hardly distinguishing, as we do, ancient from modern, and, hardly even the near from the distant 1 ■_ Whatever he may lose by 'that rather bewildering position, he will, certainly gain a clearer, view of the highly subjective character of time and space, and its almost purely personal significance,—a significance, that is, requiring entirely separate interpretation' in reference, to the., particular conditions of particulsrore-anisatinus.