Invention Of The Phonograph

While experimenting on an automatic tranamitter in the early part of last winter, Mr. Edison tried tin-foil. instead of paper, to reeeive the indentations of the Morse recorder, and was surprised to see how readily it reoeived them. These indentations, passing under another needie, were to repeat the message automatically to another wire. A few days after, whilo hardlirjg a telephone, the fancy eeized him to fix a needle-point to a diapbragm and see whether the vibration of the diaphragm when spoken against would cause the needie to prick his flnger. It did. Then he wondered what sort of an indentation this would make in a slip of paper. He tried it, and, sure enough, there was the semblance of an indented track ! What would be the effect of drawing tais slip under the point again, following the work of the automatic transmitter ? He tried that, and the result was one which almost made him wild. A sound like the stifled cry of words seeking birth came from the diaphragm. No sleep or food until he had made a grooved cylinder, put a piece of tin-foil instead of paper on it, attached the diaphragm and shouted into it, when, upon turning the crank, the words came back with a marvelous elocution, a,nd the phonograph