The Brain City at Work.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 22, 27 May 1908, Page 45

The Brain City at Work.

“A City telephone company connects over 200,000 telephones with its central switch-board. “There is an average of sixteen square feet of skin covering the human body, with an average of over 10,000 little nerve telephones in each foot square, or over 160,000 in all.” This is one of the striking comparisons which Professor Edward A. Ayers, an American scientist, draws between the human body and the up-to-date city in an article entitled, “How the Brain Works,” in “Harper’s Magazine.” Professor Ayers describes the brain as the most marvellous machine in the world. “It occupies less space in proportion to its capabilities,” he says, “than any machine it ever invented.” He shows how the human telephone answers every call. "The integument is divided into sub station areas, as is the telephone system, and when a ‘tactile corpuscle’—a skin telephone—rings up central it is answered by a sub-station agent—a little brain called a ganglion. “This clerk attends to all ordinary calls; but if one’s foot happens to step on an orange peel, or one sits on a misplaced tack, the commotion is so great that the bells of the main office ring out.”

Through the human arteries runs a scarlet stream of some twelve pounds of blood through a system of pipes, like a city’s waterworks, with its central pump and its thousands of pipes—only the water pipes are of iron and the vascular pipes are like pure rubber hose, contracting here, expanding there, to throw a smaller stream to a quiet district and a larger to the one in action. “By means of the telautoscope a man's features can be sketched in London and reproduced within,ten minutes in New York. Tile human eye can by a similar use of interrupted and disturbed vibrations send a perfect drawing of a man’s features to the brain —and send it in colour. This is a compound telautoscope.”