34 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 



when the phonograph will come to our rescue. 

 Although this little instrument is yet in its 

 infancy, I do not see how any one who has 

 examined it at all can doubt its future import- 

 ance. It may be a year from now, or ten years 

 from now, but that some day the phonograph 

 will be the reader, singer, and player for the 

 family, is to me beyond doubt. I have heard 

 results so marvellous from the instrument even 

 in its present crude shape, that when scores of 

 inventors have had time to work at it, its per- 

 formances will be nothing short of miraculous. 

 In music, especially, it seems always to have 

 excelled. The first of the Edison phonographs, 

 which were admittedly toys, so far as talking is 

 concerned, reproduced singing, violin playing, 

 whistling, with extraordinary fidelity. The 

 later instrument of to-day gives out a piano 

 piece so that not only all the notes are heard as 

 if the piano was in the next room, but even the 

 overtones and the after-vibrations of the 

 strings are distinct. Inasmuch as it will cost 

 scarcely any thing to make duplicates of the 

 wax cylinders bearing upon them music, it will 

 pay to take great pains and go to heavy ex- 

 pense in order to obtain an original cylinder 

 which gives results as perfect as possible. 

 Rubinstein may well devote himself to playing 

 into huge sounding funnels, if he knows that 

 duplicates of the little wax cylinder at the 

 other end of the funnel are to be distributed 



