COAL-TAR 75 



novels. Not so much was said about the phonograph 

 as a musical instrument. I asked Mr. Edison, when he 

 showed me that page in his notebook, if he foresaw its 

 musical possibilities at the beginning, and he said that 

 he did not, that he thought of it as a dictating machine, 

 but now, he said, "I am hoping to hear Beethoven's 

 Ninth Symphony with an orchestra of seventy-five 

 pieces perfectly reproduced before I die." 



The so-called "talking machine" has had little talk- 

 ing to do except in office work. There is little call for 

 the canned speeches of our statesmen and little demand 

 for recitations except certain comic monologues. The 

 phonograph newspaper and novel have yet to appear. 

 We shall have to substitute some sort of continuous 

 strip for the dinner plate to allow of sufficient length. 

 The radio with aid of coal-tar compounds has now en- 

 tered this field and has converted the continent into one 

 vast auditorium. 



In the field of music the phonograph has gone be- 

 yond the wildest anticipations of its early days. It 

 is the mocking-bird of musical instruments. It can 

 imitate all of them, some with such exactness as to defy 

 detection, some inadequately and imperfectly but suffi- 

 ciently well to recall to our minds the original music as 

 we may have heard it and so to give us a pleasure that 

 is partly memory, as a monochrome sketch will recall 

 a beautiful painting. It is only in trying to record a 

 chorus or large orchestra that the diaphragm gets rat- 

 tled and makes a failure. 



Whatever the defects and deficiencies of the phono- 

 graph as it is, it has served as a test of taste on a nation- 



