264 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



The telephone, which has been so rapidly adopted after 

 Edison's improvements had made it serviceable, was, like 

 photography, of comparatively slow growth. Attempts to 

 produce a workable apparatus were begun in 1837: Reiss 

 and De la Rive on the Continent, Varley in England, 

 Page and Gray in America, tried to solve the problem of 

 transmitting sound-vibrations to a great distance. Prof. 

 GRAHAM BELL (of Boston) succeeded at last (in 1876) in 

 constructing the desired instrument. To Edison, however, 

 is due the. credit of having made the telephone capable of 

 transmitting a conversation to a distance of hundreds of 

 miles. It is one of our modern wonders, like the spectro- 

 scope of Kirchhoff. But marvellous as these two instruments 

 are, the phonograph strikes the imagination still more, and 

 seems even more extraordinary : for what indeed can be 

 so fascinating, so prodigious, so impressive, what in the 

 world can in an equal degree appeal to the emotions, as 

 this apparatus which stores up speech and melodies, and 

 will reproduce them at any future period any number of 

 times? which has preserved the tone of Browning's voice 

 for us, as it would have Homer's, Shakespeare's, Milton's, 

 and as it will preserve the speech of Gladstone and 

 Tennyson ? This is, undoubtedly, the marvel of the XlXth 

 century, and probably of all times. 



Next to those admirable men come the numerous in- 

 ventors of PRIME-MOVERS for the transmission of energy, 

 by means of high-pressure water, compressed air, steam, 

 gas, electricity, the civilising potency of whose labours 

 cannot be too much valued and praised. We have already 

 natural forces, such as waterfalls, generating and transmitting 

 power to a great distance : a wire transmits the energy 

 generated by a waterfall from LaufTen, on the Neckar, to 

 Frankfort, 108 miles distant, and that city is partly lighted 

 by electricity through this means ; Rome is lighted at 

 night by electricity by power transmitted from the Tivoli 

 Falls, across the Campagna, a distance of 15 miles; the Niagara 

 Falls will within a few years transmit energy round within 

 a radius of over 300 miles so as to light cities as it did 

 the Chicago Exhibition, and 200,000, perhaps 400,000 horse- 



