“I have here three phonograph records, which I want photographed.”

“But they don’t move—­you want a still camera,” exclaimed the dumfounded manager.

“Yes, they do move as the picture is taken.  I want a microscopic lens used in the camera in such a way that we take a motion picture of the twinings and twistings of one little thread on the wax cylinder, as it records the sound waves around the cylinder.”

The photographer sniffed with scorn, being familiar with eccentric uplifters of the “movies,” but responded to the command of the manager to adjust his delicate camera mechanism for the task.

“There is a certain phrase of words on each cylinder which I want recorded this way.  Can all three be taken parallel with each other on the same film?”

“Sure, easiest thing to do—­just a triple exposure.  We take it on one edge of the film, through a little slit just a bit wider than the space of the thread, cut in a screen.  Then we rewind that film, and slide the slit to the middle of the lens, take your second wax record, and do the same on the right edge of the film for the third.  But what’s the idea?”

The camera man began to show interest:  he was a skilled mechanician and he caught the drift of a sensible purpose, at last.

Shirley did not answer.  He placed the first record in the phonograph, running it until the feminine voice could be distinguished asking:  “Can you hear me now?” He marked the beginning and end of this phrase with his pocket knife.  So with the merry masculine and the aged, disagreeable voice, he located the same order of words:  “Can you hear me now?” The operation seems easy, in the telling, or again perhaps it appears intensely involved and hardly worth the trouble.  A motto of Shirley’s was:  “Nothing is too much trouble if it’s worth while.”  So, with this.  To the cynical camera man its general nature was expressed in his whispered phrase to the manager: 

“You better not leave them property butcher knives on that there table, Mr. Harrison.  This gink is nuts:  he thinks’s he’s Mike Angelo or some other sculpture.  He’ll start sculpin’ the crowd in a minute!”

“You take the picture and keep your opinions to yourself,” snapped Shirley whose hearing was highly trained.

The man lapsed into silence.  For two hours they fumed and perspired and swore, under the intense heat of the low-hung mercury lamps, until at last a test proved they had the right combination.  Shirley greased the skill of the camera man with a well-directed gratuity, and ordered speedy development of the film.  Before this was done, however, he took six other records of voices from the folk in the studio, using the same words:  “Can you hear me now?”

The three strips of triple exposures were taken to the dark room and developed by the camera man.  They were dried on the revolving electric drums, near a battery of fans.  Shirley studied every step of the work, with this and that question —­this had been his method of acquiring a curiously catholic knowledge of scientific methods since leaving the university, where sporting proclivities had prompted him to slide through courses with as little toil as possible.