The throat and its functions in swallowing, breathing and the production of the voice. ... illus.

  • Louis Elsberg
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The throat and its functions in swallowing, breathing and the production of the voice. ... illus. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    Kempelen and by Faber. Faber's talking machine was brought to this cily about eight years ago, and for several years was ex- hibited in various parts of the country by a nephew of the original inventor, Joseph Faber, of Vienna. It imitates the human voice and speech organ in its construction, and being worked by means of a bellows and finger board, it can produce words and sentences in several languages with varying degrees of loudness, even to whispering, and with varying pitch. Still more recently a machine has been invented for reproducing instead of producing the human voice. This is the phonograph devised by Thomas A. Edison. Edison's phonograph differs from the phonographs I have described to you essentially in this, that instead of smoked paper or smoked glass, tin-foil is used for receiving the impressions made by the writing pin. The cylinder on which the tin-foil is placed, is grooved, and the metallic pin pressing against it, when moved by the membrane, makes permanent indentations in the tin-foil. // occurred to Edison [and it is this that marks the difference between men of genius and us common mortals, that all sorts of wonderful and unheard-of things, though they be really as simple as the indenting of Columbus's egg, occur to them and not to us], I say, it occurred to Edison that the process by which the inden- tations were made, might just as well be rei^ersed. The motions of the air, called voice sounds, had made the membrane vibrate that carried the little pin that made the indentations, as the tin-foil was passed by. Now, to reverse the process, the in- dented tin-foil was passed by, and as the metallic pin maintained its contact with the surface of the tin-foil, it moved, just as it had done before. The membrane to which it was attached