Heroes of the Telegraph

In the VOYAGE A LA LUNE of De Cyrano Bergerac, published at Paris in 1650, and subsequently translated into English, there is a long account of a 'mechanical book' which spoke its contents to the listener. 'It was a book, indeed,' says Cyrano, 'but a strange and wonderful book, which had neither leaves nor letters,' and which instructed the Youth in their walks, so that they knew more than the Greybeards of Cyrano's country, and need never lack the company of all the great men living or dead to entertain them with living voices. Sir David Brewster surmised that a talking machine mould be invented before the end of the century. Mary Somerville, in her CONNECTION OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, wrote some fifty years ago: 'It may be presumed that ultimately the utterances or pronunciation of modern languages will be conveyed, not only to the eye, but also to the ear of posterity. Had the ancients possessed the means of transmitting such definite sounds, the civilised world must have responded in sympathetic notes at the distance of many ages.' In the MEMOIRES DU GEANT of M. Nadar, published in 1864, the author says: 'These last fifteen years I have amused myself in thinking there is nothing to prevent a man one of these days from finding a way to give us a daguerreotype of sound--the phonograph--something like a box in which melodies will be fixed and kept, as images are fixed in the dark chamber.' It is also on record that, before Edison had published his discovery to the world, M. Charles Cros deposited a sealed packet at the Academie des Sciences, Paris, giving an account of an invention similar to the phonograph.