The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1878-08-03 00:00:00

DOGS IN FRANCE.

The Evening Standard remarks :—" Certain recent
cases of death from hydrophobia in Paris, and notably
that of the son of the director of the Gymnaso Theatre,
who fell a victim to the cruel malady under peculiarly
painful circumstances a few weeks since, have created
a'panic among the public, and caused the authorities
to adapt etrict —one might almost say, harsh—mea-
sures towards the four-footed friends of humanity.
Not only are dogs to be muzzled, to be allowed no
more liberty when abroad than the length of the
cord which their master holds permits, to be
tied up even within doors when their home
is a restaurant, a shop, or other place in which the
public enters; but when any neglect of the regula-
tions, on the part of their owners, brings dogs to
the pound, the usual brief hours of grase which
formerly intervened before the luckless quadrupeds
i '
execution are, t is stated, no longer to be accorded
them, and they are to be hanged immediately upon
their arrival. Last year, fourteen thousand dose were
put an end to in the court-yard of La-Fourribre ; this
year, the number will probably be greater; but sup-
peeing this annual saerifiels of canine life be unavoid-
able, it is, at least, desirous that the poor animals
should be killed in the mannerwhieh exposes them to
the smallest amount of suffering possible. In Paris,
the authorities hang dogs which are either masteiless
or whose masters have allowed them to stray. In
New Yo.k, where dogs are the objects of equally
rigorous measures they are drowned by being shut up
in an iron Gage and gently lowered into the river. It
is considered by many tli!st the latter process of de-
struotion is more expeditions and less painful than
that which is employed in France. If this be so, a
sentiment of humanity should induce the French
authorities to adopt it.

Du/ing til44 first aeries yf bull Uhts at MiLdrid this
Tsar, Pg twee animals and 143 bb•Mos were Mired.

The INVENTOR of the PHONOGRAPH,

The following is an extract from an extremely interesting
article in this week's World, under the above titie

. . . The inventor of the phonograph, Thomas
Alva Edison, was born in Ohio thirty-one years ago.
He commenced his enterprising career as a newsboy on
the Grand Trunk Railway. Very soon he had obtained
a monopoly for the sale of papers over the line, and
employed four boy-assistants. By and by he conceived
the idea of publishing for himself. There was an old
springless car, with a smoking-room, attached to the
train on which be sold his papers; and as no one
would travel in it, Edison got leave to use it. He
bought an nld press and a quantity of type, fitted it up
in the smoking-room, and regularly iesued a small
weekly print called the Grand Trunk Herald, price
three cents, containing gossip of the neighbourhood,
accidents, and other matter. George Stephen-
son, at work on the Montreal tubular bridge,
found Edison engaged on his paper, and was so
pleased with the boy's earnestness that he ordered an
extra edition for himself. This connection with the
press introduced him to the telegraph, which he
straightway determined to master. Having learned
how to send and receive messages, at the age of seven-
teen he obtained a situation as telegraph operator in
Stratford, Canada. Thence he went from city to city
of the States—west, south, and east—Cincinnati,
Indianopolis, Louisville, New Orleans, Boston, and
New York, leading an unsettle 1 operatar'e life; now
being discharged, now leaving of his own accord. All
his spare cash and time were spent in providing experi-
mental electrical apparatus to illustrate his studies or
to try some of the original ideas which thronged
his brain. At Indianopolis he produced his first
inventive success, an automatic signalling instru-
ment, and at Cincinnati in 1865 he perfected a
duplex system for sending two messages in contrary
directions over one wire at once. He was pooh-poohed
and ridiculed until he went to Boston in 1868, where
an appreciative superintendent of the office recognised
in him the fire of suppressed genius. It happened that
eight years ago these was unusual excitement in the
gold market, and at the climax of the hurry the com-
p..ny's indicating instrument broke down. The super-
intendent was out, and no one could set it right. In
the midst of the confusion Edison stepped up and
volunteered to do it. The manager looked somewhat
dubiously at the new-corner; but the emergency WAS
great, and Edison's offer was accepted. In a few
moments the instrument was working as before, and
Edison was forthwith engaged at a good salary in the
service of the company. From this time his career is
that of an electrician and inventor. He soon patented
several valuabli) inventions, and became well known,
was appointed inventor-in. :thief to the Weqernrl7niOn,
the colossal telegraphy monopoly of America, and to
other companies. Two years ago he retired to Menlo
Park, a sequestered spot on the Pennsylvania Railway,
twenty-four miles from New York.
"His establishment here consists of his laboratory,
dwelling-house, and the cottages of his workmen, in-
cluding a restaurant started by a smart Yankee for
the convenience of Edison's visitors. The laboratory
is a plain wooden building, two stories high, isolated
on an eminence. The lower part is occupied by
Edison's office and library, and a mechanics' shop,
where a dozen fitters are forging and shaping his ideas
Into iron and wood. Upstairs is the laboratory
proper, a long room lined from end to end with an
array of chemicals. On tables and in show-cases
about the room are lying all manner of telegraphic
I apparatus, lenses, crucibles, and pieces of his own
instruments—telephones, phonographs, aud aero-
phones, A perfect tangle of telegraph-wires from all
parts of the Union are focussed at one end of the
room. An ash-covered forge, a cabinet organ, a rusty
stove with an old pivot chair, a table well stained with
oils and acids, complete the furniture of this curious
den, into which the sunlight filters through the chemi-
cal jars, and falls in particoloured patches on the
dusty floor As soon as his mind lights
upon any new or peculiar fact, at once he con-
ceives an application of it. The phonograph
was discovered in the following manner :—He
had invented an apparatus for recording ordinary
telegraph signals by a stylus on yielding material, so
that the record could serve to retransmit the message
automatically. One day, while experimenting with a
vibrating telephone diaphragm, to which a pricker
was fixed, the pricker pierced his finger by the force
of the vibrations, and drew blood. In an instant
there flashed into his mind the idea of the phonograph.
He saw that the voice had power to cause a alualar
pricker to indent its vibrations in a sheet of tinfoil, so
that they could be automatically reproduced. As a
proof Of his power of work, it may be further said that
the idea of the phonograph occurred to him one Wed-
nesday afternoon, and he worked on all Wednesday
night, Thursday, Thursday night, Friday, and Friday
night, till Saturday morning. By that time he had
constructed a completely successful phonograph, theta
be went to bed, and slept with hardly a break till
Monday morning.
‘• Edison has been described by the United States
Commissioner of Patents as the young man who has
kept the path to the Patent Office hot with his foot-
steps. During the last ten years he has taken out one
hundred and fifty-seven patents, and applied for
seventy-seven more. Of these, however, only fifteen
or twenty are important inventions, the zest being
obtained to fence them round. His yearly income from
his patents is now over £lO,OOO, and he has realised in
all over £BO,OOO from them. This sum has been sunk,
as soon as it was earned, on books and experi-
ments. As for the phonograph, his faith in it is
boundless. In future, he believes, letters will be
talked, hooka read, sermons preached, languages and
music taught, parlour-operas played, announcements
made, and, reporting dune by phonograph. Voice-
albums will beoeme the fashion, and the memorable
words of great men will be treasured in museums.
'There was a fortune in the Pope's last blessing,' says
Edison, somewhat irreverently; 'the phonograph
record of it, multiplied by electretypiug, would have
sold for five dollars apiece easily.' It is said that Dori
gets suggestions for profiles from the shadow of a
piece of crumpled tissue-paper thrown on the sunlit
ground; and so will the phonograph, driven back-
ward, hint all manner of new musical combina-
tions to the musician. Edison is now making one
with a sapphire point, which will record even -a
whisper, and contain a complete novel of Dickens's
(50,000 words) on a sheet of tinfoil ten inches
square. There are other marvels yet to come. By
the aerophone he hopes to make ships converse at sea,
though several miles apart; and his boast is that he
will make the statue of Liberty, to be set up in New
York Harbour, read the Declaration of Independence
so loud that all Manhattan Island shall hear it.
Another new thing is the 'mega-phone,' a kind of
small ear-trumpet, doing for the ear what the opera.
glass does for the eye; and, slightly deaf as he is
inclined to be, Edison declares that by its aid he can
hear a cow chew her cud an eighth of a mile distant.
These are things of the future. Meanwhile, it is
enough that his actual achievements stamp him as a
prodigy in mechanical invention."