38 M7'. John Lee on 



largely subconscious the method of masking those sounds which 

 are less efficiently carried by the metallic medium and of slightly 

 emphasizing those sounds which are definitely and clearly carried 

 by the medium. There is also the art of telephone hearing by 

 which one learns to rely on the clearer consonants and to fit in 

 the sounds which come less definitely. So ib comes about that 

 the person who hears most efficiently on the telephone is not the 

 person whose hearing is most acute, but he who has reasonably 

 good hearing and who also has the quasi-musical gift of building 

 sounds into sound phrases, " out of three sounds he makes," as 

 Browning says, "not a fourth sound but a star." Everyone is 

 not equally successful with telephone speech, but it is true that 

 far more persons are successful with telephone speech than with 

 telephone hearing. Having said this by way of fundamental, I 

 have to point out that there are further subtleties. In some 

 extraordinary way not yet explicable there are certain sympathies 

 which we have to take into account. Certain speakers ap]:)eal to 

 certain hearers. Certain methods of articulation seem to suit 

 certain ])sychological tendencies in piecing together the sounds 

 which do come and the sounds which do not come. I have 

 known cases where speakers whom I should expect to be per- 

 fectly clear on the telephone do not produce this effect at the 

 distant end. Also I have known cases where men whose hearing 

 is thought to be imperfect have shown astonishing skill in being 

 able to interpret methods of articulation which do not suit the 

 metallic medium of the telephone. The fact is that the telephone 

 does not seem to us to be mechanical. We have forgotten that 

 it can only apply the transmission of sounds to human use by 

 means of a mechanical medium. There is a great religious leader 

 who is said to be buried with a telephone in his coffin, readily 

 joined up, to be used in emergencies. That was a profound 

 compliment to the telephone. For that religious leader always 

 asserted the purely spiritual nature of the resurrection, and in 

 doing so he forgot that by installing a telephone ho was insisting 

 upon a mechanical means of transition. 



