A.M.

"For a long time some people thought there was trickery. One morning
at Menlo Park a gentleman came to the laboratory and asked to see the
phonograph. It was Bishop Vincent, who helped Lewis Miller found the
Chautauqua I exhibited it, and then he asked if he could speak a few
words. I put on a fresh foil and told him to go ahead. He commenced to
recite Biblical names with immense rapidity. On reproducing it he said:
'I am satisfied, now. There isn't a man in the United States who could
recite those names with the same rapidity.'"

The phonograph was now fairly launched as a world sensation, and a
reference to the newspapers of 1878 will show the extent to which it and
Edison were themes of universal discussion. Some of the press notices
of the period were most amazing--and amusing. As though the real
achievements of this young man, barely thirty, were not tangible
and solid enough to justify admiration of his genius, the "yellow
journalists" of the period began busily to create an "Edison myth," with
gross absurdities of assertion and attribution from which the modest
subject of it all has not yet ceased to suffer with unthinking people.
A brilliantly vicious example of this method of treatment is to be found
in the Paris Figaro of that year, which under the appropriate title of
"This Astounding Eddison" lay bare before the French public the most
startling revelations as to the inventor's life and character. "It
should be understood," said this journal, "that Mr. Eddison does not
belong to himself. He is the property of the telegraph company which
lodges him in New York at a superb hotel; keeps him on a luxurious
footing, and pays him a formidable salary so as to be the one to know
of and profit by his discoveries. The company has, in the dwelling of
Eddison, men in its employ who do not quit him for a moment, at the
table, on the street, in the laboratory. So that this wretched man,
watched more closely than ever was any malefactor, cannot even give a
moment's thought to his own private affairs without one of his guards
asking him what he is thinking about." This foolish "blague" was
accompanied by a description of Edison's new "aerophone," a steam
machine which carried the voice a distance of one and a half miles. "You
speak to a jet of vapor. A friend previously advised can answer you
by the same method." Nor were American journals backward in this wild
exaggeration.

The furor had its effect in stimulating