PROCEEDINGS. 169 



time Mr. Edison was busily engaged on the electric light and 

 others of his inventions, and almost neglected the perfecting of 

 his phonograph. In the meantime two gentlemen, Messrs. Bell 

 and Tainter, took up Edison's idea and perfected a machine which 

 is now known as the graphophone, the principle of recording 

 sounds and reproducing them being precisely the same. When 

 one morning Mr. Edison woke up and found such a machine 

 invented which eclipsed his own tinfoil phonograph, he started to 

 work and had been at work some two years in perfecting the 

 Phonograph, and during that time he was said to have spent 

 ,£32,000 in bringing the machine to perfection. When he (Mr. 

 Garland) went to England and America last year he determined 

 to secure one of Mr. Edison's latest perfected phonographs. He 

 made two trips to America, and during that time spent many 

 days in Mr. Edison's factory examining the method of manufacture. 

 His acquaintance with the machine had extended over a period 

 of nine or ten months, and he certainly could say that the infatu- 

 ation which was inseparable from an acquaintance with it extended. 

 Mr. Garland then explained the construction of the machine under 

 exhibition. Continuing his remarks, he said that at first it was 

 made purely as a commercial machine, and not with any view of 

 recording music. It was really made to act the part of a short- 

 hand writer, and as such was largely used in many American 

 houses of business. The principal of an office would, on arriving 

 and opening and reading the letters, in lieu of dictating to a 

 shorthand writer, dictate direct to the phonograph, and as he 

 dictated his letters he would place the little grammes in a little 

 box. Those grammes were numbered, and the office boy or girl 

 would afterwards place them upon the machine and typewrite the 

 letters as they had been dictated to the machine. The business 

 man would afterwards read the typewritten letters, sign them and 

 they were ready for the post. That meant an enormous saving 

 of time and labour. The machine never made a mistake. What- 

 ever was dictated to it, it would correctly repeat. 



The machine he was about to exhibit was a commercial machine 

 and not a musical one ; therefore the audience should not expect 

 too much from it, though he would give a few examples of its 

 capabilities in that direction. He mentioned that Edison was 

 engaged on a machine to be used for the reproduction of music, 

 which would eclipse as a musical box the one he was exhibiting. 

 Edison's laboratory at the town of Orange, New Jersey, was a 

 large concern. He had 400 hands employed there upon the 

 instrument, and had no less than 1,000 machines employed in the 

 manufacture of the phonograph, some of them about as complex 

 as the phonograph itself. All that machinery was driven by 

 electricity. The same principle was being employed with many 



