formity of motion. A sheet of
tinfoil formed the record, and the delivery could be heard by a roomful
of people. But articulation was sacrificed at the expense of loudness.
It was as though a parrot or a punchinello spoke, and sentences which
were unexpected could not be understood. Clearly, if the phonograph
were to become a practical instrument, it required to be much improved.
Nevertheless this apparatus sufficiently demonstrated the feasibility of
storing up and reproducing speech, music, and other sounds. Numbers of
them were made, and exhibited to admiring audiences, by license, and
never failed to elicit both amusement and applause. To show how striking
were its effects, and how surprising, even to scientific men, it may be
mentioned that a certain learned SAVANT, on hearing it at a SEANCE of
the Academie des Sciences, Paris, protested that it was a fraud, a piece
of trickery or ventriloquism, and would not be convinced.

After 1878 Edison became too much engaged with the development of the
electric light to give much attention to the phonograph, which, however,
was not entirely overlooked. His laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey,
where the original experiments were made, was turned into a factory for
making electric light machinery, and Edison removed to New York until
his new laboratory at Orange, New Jersey, was completed. Of late he has
occupied the latter premises, and improved the phonograph so far that it
is now a serviceable instrument. In one of his 1878 patents, the use
of wax to take the records in place of tinfoil is indicated, and it
is chiefly to the adoption of this material that the success of the
'perfected phonograph' is due. Wax is also employed in the 'graphophone'
of Mr. Tainter and Professor Bell, which is merely a phonograph under
another name. Numerous experiments have been made by Edison to find
the bees-wax which is best adapted to receive the record, and he has
recently discovered a new material or mixture which is stated to yield
better results than white wax.

The wax is moulded into the form of a tube or hollow cylinder, usually 4
1/4 inches long by 2 inches in diameter, and 1/8 inch thick. Such a size
is capable of taking a thousand words on its surface along a delicate
spiral trace; and by paring off one record after another can be used
fifteen times. There are a hundred or more lines of the trace in the
width of an inch, and they are hardly visible to the naked eye. Only
with a