708 



PHONOGRAPH. 



sufficiently for him to make his escape in Octo- 

 ber. A revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the 

 Government and restore Pierola to power ended 

 in a, fiasco on Dec. 21, when Col. Arturo Morales 

 Toledo entered the artillery barracks and uttered 

 a pronunciamiento. A battalion of infantry 

 from Ayacucho, which was in the fort, was faith- 

 ful to the Government. These soldiers killed 

 the leaders, mostly officers of the army, and 

 frustrated an attempt to seize the store of rifles 

 in the arsenal. Pierola was a few miles away, 

 waiting to be signaled by the firing of cannon 

 to make his entry into the capital. 



Foreign Relations. Boundary difficulties 

 with Bolivia and Ecuador have been amicably 

 adjusted. The French Government, in behalf of 

 the Dreyfus claim that has been rejected by the 

 Peruvian Government, made a proposal to en- 

 force it through the intervention of Chili. That 

 republic was invited to adopt the claim, and on 

 the strength of it to declare permanent the occu- 

 pation of Tacna, which, according to the treaty 

 of peace, is to be terminated or rendered defini- 

 tive by the decision o the popular vote of the 

 department at the end of ten years from Oct. 

 20, 1883, the date of the treaty. The Ameri- 

 can minister interceded unofficially in the 

 autumn of 1890 in behalf of Francis Pen- 

 zotti, a Methodist minister, who is an 

 Italian citizen but the agent of the Ameri- 

 can Bible Society. He conducted in pri- 

 vate, since public services in any but the Ro- 

 man Catholic religion are forbidden by 

 law, a missionary chapel in Callao, 

 made some converts. For this he was 

 arrested in July and kept in jail 

 several months without trial. 



PHONOGRAPH, an instrument 

 for recording and reproducing ar- 

 ticulate sound. It was invented 

 by Thomas A. Edison in 1878, and has since been 

 greatly improved. It acts on the well-known 

 law of acoustics, that sound consists of a series 

 of waves spreading from a first cause, as ripples 

 from a stone dropped in water. The original 

 phonograph consisted of a shaft passing through 



When revolved, the cylinder was given a longi- 

 tudinal motion by means of a screw thread in 

 the shaft, and the steel point, following the un- 



and 



FIG. 1. THE ORIGINAL PHONOGRAPH. 

 B, balance-wheel with crank; C, cylinder; D, dia- 

 phragm; F, funnel. 



a cylinder made to revolve b} means of a balance 

 wheel and crank (Fig. 1). 



In the surface of the cylinder a screw thread 

 was cut, and there was laid over it a delicate 

 sheathing of tinfoil. Placed against this foil 

 was a steel point projecting from the center of 

 a diaphragm, composed of a thin sheet of iron. 

 A sectional view of this diaphragm and point in 

 position is shown in Fig. 2. 



FIG. 2. DIAPHRAGM AND POINT IN POSITION SECTIONAL VIEW. 

 A, diaphragm; P, point; C, cylinder; D, crank; BB, rubber disk. 



deriving lines on the cylinder, reproduced them 

 through the sensitive tinfoil. 



If a sound wave struck the diaphragm, the 

 vibration communicated through the point made 

 the line traced in the foil of unequal depth, and 

 where the sound was made by the human voice, 

 these indentations were. visible speech. 



Tones of all kinds produced each its own vi- 

 bration and consequent record on the sensitive 

 foil. In order to reproduce the sounds, the point 

 was withdrawn and the cylinder revolved back- 

 ward to its original position. Again applied, 

 the point passed along the uneven groove it had 

 already made, when the vibrations of the dia- 

 phragm were exactly repeated, and sounds re- 

 sembling the original ones were produced. 



In this first phonograph, only loud or sharp 

 sounds were given back with any certainty, and 

 even these were weak in volume and had an 

 unpleasant metallic quality. This was due to 

 the properties of the tinfoil receiving the record, 

 and also to a lack of delicacy throughout the 

 various parts of the machine. Another serious 

 defect, preventing its perfect reproduction of 

 sound, lay in the fact that the slightest variation 

 in the speed with which the cylinder was turned 

 altered the key of the tones given out. Thus, a 

 high soprano voice, if repeated slowly, became ;i 

 deep bass, and a low voice was correspondingly 

 high if given rapidly. 



Sometimes the steel point in going back over 



