Year: 1878




Fly Sound as the Tramp Of Cavalry.


We appear to be only atthe beginning
of discoveries in tue line of the tele.
phone and the phonograph. An entirely
new field of science has been opened;
the limits cannot even be guessed. An
instrument has been devised that bears
relation to our capacity for hearing,
similar to that which the microscope or
the telephone does for vision. The new
device magnifies sound. II is appropri-
ately called microphone. By its means
sounds so faint that they have never be-
fore been heard by human ears may be
made of any degree of loudness. A
feathers edge brushed over the sound
ing board of this instrument has been
made to crash upon the ears of the list
eners. The touch of the tip of cam
els-hair brush was the occasion Of
ga cracking noise, of which the inten-
sity was almost painful to the ear. I"
The faintest whisper of the human voice
can be reproduced in the loudest tones.
"The maiden's sigh may roar like the
cataract of Niagara.


Prof. d. E. Hughes has given full
account of the microphone to the Royal
Society of London, and described the
steps by which he was led to the inven.
ton. He is most widely known in Eng
land as the inventor of a type printing
telegraph instrument which is in gene
raj use in that county. Although he is
an accomplished electrician, the appara-
tus which he has employed for his new
experiments is of the simplest character,
and the most trihing cost. With it he
has made the footsteps of the house-fy
distinctly audible; and all these sounds,
after being intensified, are transmitted
to any needful distance by the ordinary
telephone. At a recent exhibition Of
these experiments to O few scientific
friends in London, all the astonishing
effects that have been referred to were
easily produced, except the fly perform
ance. With great difficulty the philoso-
pliers found fly in the house. With
yet greater difficulty they caught the in
acct. But the final trouble was insur-
mountable; the captured fly would stay
on the glass tumbler that imprisoned
him; nothing could induce him to walk
on the sounding board which the tum.
bier covered. But witness to the
scene, describing it in Nature, found
consolation in watching Prof. Huxley
talking with great solemnity to glass
tube two inches long, his grave tones
being loudly enunciated to a listener
with telephone in distant apartment.


The philosophy of the new invention
is more difficult to explain than is the
telephone itself. The discovery has
been made by Prof. Hughes that the
vibrations of the sound are reproduced
with the greatest delicacy and increased
force, by certain materials interposed in
an electric circuit. The reproduced
sounds gain their increase of power,
doubtless, al the expense OF the current
After large number of experiments,
he gives the preference to carbon for
this purpose; especially to pieces of
charcoal that have been heated to white
ness, and then plunged into mercury.
These pieces, in one of his. experiments,
he placed in a glass tube, and brought
pressure upon them that squeezed their
ends together. This apparatus was
made part of closed electric current of
three small cups. A Bell telephone was
then introduced into the circuit, and the
whole thing was complete. All that was
necessary to do was to talk to the tube,
when at respectable distance from it,
and the telephole repeated the sound, at
any distance yet tried, with q loudness
dependent only on the pressure in the
tube.