NOT WONDERS OF THE TELEPHONE.

Colonist, Volume XX, Issue 2417, 11 July 1878, Page 4

NOT WONDERS OF THE TELEPHONE.

We -appear to be onlj at the beginning of discoveries in the line of the telephone and the phonograph. An entirely uew field of science has been opened ; the limits cannot even be guessed.. An instrument has been devised that bears a relation to our capacity for hearing,, similar to that which themieroicope or the telescope does tor vision.. The new device magnifies sound. It id appropriately called the microphone. By it« means sounds so faint that they have never before been heard by human ears, may be made of any degree of loudness. A feather's edge brushed over the sounding-board of this instrument, has been made to crash upon the ears of the listeners. The touch of the tip of a camel's-hair brush was the occasion of " a crackling noise, of which the intensity was almost painful to the ear." The faintest whispw of the human voice can be reproduced in the loudest tones. "The maiden's Bigh may roar like the cataract of Niagara."

Professor D. E. Hughes haa given a full account of the microphone to the Koyal Society of London, and described the steps by which he was led to make the invention. He is moßt widely known in England as the inventor of a type-printing telegraph inntrument which is in general use in that country.: Although he is an accomplished electrician, the'(apparatus which he has employed for his. new; experiments is of the simplest character, and the most trifling cost. With it he has made the footsteps of a housefly distinctly/audible r 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 a few scientific friends in London, all the astonishing effects that have been referred to were easily produced, except the fly performance. With great difficulty the philosophers found a fly in the house. With yet greater difficulty they caught the insect. But the final trouble was insurmountable; the captured fly would stay on the glass tumbler that imprisoned him ; nothing could induce him to walk on the sounding board which the tumbler covered. But a witness to the scene, describing it in Nature, found consolation in watching Professor Huxley talking with great solemnity to a glass tube two inches long, his grave tones being loudly enunciated to a listener with a telephone in a distant apartment. The philosophy of the new invention is more difficult to explainthan is the telephone itself. The discovery has been made by Profeiior Hughes that; the vibrations of

sound are reproduced with the greatest delicacy and increased force, by certain material! interposed in an electric circuit. The reproduced sounds gain their increase of power, doubtless, at the expense of the current. After a large number of experiments, he gives the preference to carbon for this purpose; especially to pieces of charcoal that hare been heated to whiteness, and then plunged into mercury. These pieces, in one of his experiments, he placed in a glane tube, and brought a pressure upon thsm that squeezed their ends together. This apparatus was made part of a closed electric circuit 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, even at a respectful distance from it, and the telephone repeated the sound, at any distance yet tried, with a loudnesa dependent only on the pressure in the tube. This disposes at once of the fear that the telephone was Bearing the end of its usefulness as an instrument for conveying speech. It is only at the beginning. With such means there will be no obstacle to repoitiDg a public speaker or singer ; no difficulty, in fact, in hearing whispers inaudible to unassisted ears. All that has ever been imagined as among the possibilites of the phonograph or the telephone spema now certain to be outdone. Since the falling of a pin can now be heard at the distance of a hundred miles, little will be ueeded to realize Hood's metaphor, that Silence herself may be making a row.