THE MACHINE THAT “TALKS BACK.”

The invention for making nature give an intelligent response may well be regarded with wondering interest.  The odd, we might say humorous, feature of the invention is that nature, being as it were cornered and compelled to respond, will answer nothing except to repeat what is said in her ear! The phonograph may be defined as a mechanical parrot.  Unlike the living bird, however, it never makes answers malapropos.  It never deviates from the original text.  The distrust which has been justly cherished against the talking bird on account of his originality can never be reasonably directed against the phonograph!

The possibility of writing sound has been recognized for a century past.  Since the discovery of the vibratory character of sound, the physicist has seen the feasibility of recording the vibration.  Nature herself has given many hints along this line of experimentation.  Long ago it was seen that the writing sand sprinkled on the sounding board of the piano would under the influence of a chord struck from the keys arrange itself in geometrical figures.  It was also seen that a discord sounded from the key-board would break the figures into chaos and confusion.  Were not these phenomena sufficient to suggest that sound might be written in intelligible characters?

The mind, however, moves slowly from the old to the new.  The former concept of physical facts and the laws which govern them is not readily given up.  A great discovery in physical science seems to disturb the foundations of nature.  It does not really do so; the disturbance is not in nature, but in the mind.  No endeavor of man, no advance of his from some old bivouac to a new camping-ground, affects in the least the order of the world.  The change, we repeat, is in the man, and in the race to which he belongs.

Long and tedious has been the process of getting thought into a recorded form.  The first method of expressing thought was oral.  Long before any other method of holding ideas and delivering them to others was devised or imagined, speech came.  Speech is oral.  It is made of sound.  Oral utterance is no doubt as old as the race itself.  It began with the first coming of our kind into this sphere.  Indeed we now know that the rudiments of speech exist in the faculties of the lower animals.  The studies of Professor Garner have shown conclusively that the humble simian folk of the African forest have a speech or language.  Of this the professor himself has become a student, and he claims to have learned at least sixty words of the vocabulary!

Strange it is to note the course which linguistic development has taken.  At the first, there was a spoken language only.  The next stage was to get this spoken language recorded, not in audible, but in visible symbols.  Why should it have been so easy and apparently natural for the old races to invent a visible form of speech-writing rather than an audible form?  Why should the ancients have fallen back on the eye rather than the ear as the sense to be instructed?  Why should sight-writing have been invented thousands of years ago, and sound-writing postponed until the present day?