THE TALKING MACHINE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16513, 25 August 1921, Page 2

THE TALKING MACHINE.

NOVELTY THAT BECAME A NECESSITY, Tlie novelties of .yesterday are the necessities of to-day (jays an American paper). This truism explains just why it is that the salary of yesterday, oven though allowance is made for the increase in actual living costs, would falter and fail before the demands of the present. In 1877 Edison was experimenting vrijtb the talking machine. In 18S8 he placed the first phonograph on the market. Amazed patrons of the new device paid a nickel for the privilege of placing tubes in their ears and hearing the wheezy, metallic rendition of popular airs. They were still singing that morunful ballad, et Alter the Ball,” in those days, wcera’t they. 0 But not matter. It was quite generally admitted that the talking machine was about the last word in ingenuity. The latest census of the talking machine industry show's its annual value of products to be 108,048.000d0l for America alone, and we behold the transformation of Edison’s idea, the pleasing novelty of its time, to a mammoth enterprise, fire times greater than it was five years previously, when its total value of output was but 27,116,00d01. The number of individual machines manufactured in 1910, for example, was 2,226.000, and the number of disc and cylinder records waa 106,997,000. That’s one record a piece for all of us ip continental America. When Edison the wizard perfected his device to transfer sound vibrations to a wax cylinder and

reproduce them again in vocal and instrumental select ions, was he seer enough to foresee this ? The novelties of yesterday aro tlie necessities of today. It is not generally known, perhaps, that an earlier inventor blazed the trail for Edison. He was Leon Scott, who in 1855 constructed tlio first talking machine. Equipped with a- tinfoil record, incapable of being reproduced more than a few times, the instrument was played with lor a year or so and presently forgotten.