450 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The inventor has prej^ared a large and beautiful singing lustre, 

 with a dozen or fifteen jets, which can be placed in the richest or most 

 comfortable drawing-room. This lustre may be used at concerts or 

 balls, for it can play all the airs in dance-music. It will be worked 

 by electricity, so that the performer who plays may be seated in a 

 neighboring room. The effect will be perfectly magical. The future 

 has other surprises for us for our houses. The most unexpected ap- 

 plications of scientific principles are daily the result of the skillful 

 efforts of learned men. 



Without reckoning Prof. Tyndall, who is so well known and es- 

 teemed on the Continent, many other learned men, English, German, 

 Austrian (like Shaffgotsche), and* Frenchmen, have already studied 

 singing-flames, but no one had previously thought of studying the 

 effects produced by two or several flames brought together, till M. 

 Kastner, who, by means of delicate combinations and ingenious mech- 

 anism, has produced the pyrophone. 



Frederick Kastner, the inventor of the pyrophone, showed from his 

 earliest age a very decided taste for scientific pursuits. His parents, 

 whose fine fortune permitted them to satisfy the taste of their son for 

 study, gave him facilities often denied to genius. They frequently 

 traveled : the first thing which arrested his attention was a railway ; 

 this pleased him much ; he had a passion for locomotives, just as some 

 children have for horses. He was only three years old when he ex- 

 amined the smallest details with a lively feeling of curiosity. Later 

 on, when he tried to reason and explain his impressions, he over- 

 whelmed with questions those who surrounded him, wishing to learn 

 the mechanism of these great machines, and the mysterious force 

 which sets them to work. But, what more especially charmed him 

 was, when the train stopped at the station, the fiery aspect of the 

 jets of gas emerging suddenly from the darkness. At this sight he 

 shouted with delight ; such was his enthusiasm, that he seemed as 

 if he would jump out of the arms of those who held him, in order 

 to rush toward the jets of flames, which exercised upon him a sort 

 of fascination. 



Steam and gas, in their modern application to locomotion and 

 lightning, were the first scientific marvels which struck the mind and 

 the sense of the child. He studied music under the skillful direction 

 of his father. From the age of fifteen years, in studying gas particu- 

 larly, his attention was directed to singing-flames. The mysteries of 

 electricity were also at this time the object of his stixdy. The re- 

 searches to which he gave himself up carried him on to invent a novel 

 application of electricity as a motive force. He patented this inven- 

 tion. On the 17th of March, 1873, the Baron Larrey, member of the 

 Academy of Sciences of Paris, presented to the Institut de France 

 young Kastner's first memoir on singing-flames, which laid down the 

 following new principle : 



