ready for putting into a little box
made on purpose for mails. We are making sheets in three sizes--one
for letters of from 800 to 1,000 words, another size for 2,000 words,
and another size for 4,000 words.

"I expect that an agreement may be made with the post-office
authorities enabling phonogram boxes to be sent at the same rate as a
letter. The receiver of the phonogram will put it into his apparatus
and the message will be given out more clearly and distinctly than the
best telephone message ever sent. The tones of the voice in the two
phonographs which I have finished are so perfectly rendered that one
can distinguish between twenty different persons, each one of whom has
said a few words. One tremendous advantage is that the letter may be
repeated a thousand times. The phonogram does not wear out by use.
Moreover, it may be filed away for a hundred years and be ready for
the instant it is needed. If a man dictates his will to a phonograph,
there will be no disputing the authenticity of the document with those
who knew the tones of his voice in life. The cost of making the
phonograph will be scarcely more than the cost of ordinary letter
paper. The machine will read out a letter or message at the same speed
with which it was dictated."

Edison also has experimented with a device to enable printers to set
type directly from the dictation of the phonograph. He claims great
precision in repeating orchestral performances, so that the
characteristic tones of all the instruments may be distinguished.

_Type-setting Eclipsed_.--A new machine has been invented at
Minneapolis which supersedes type-setting. By this machine, which is
no larger than a small type-writer and operates on the same plan, a
plate or matrix is produced, which is easily stereotyped, thus
attaining the same result which is ordinarily reached by preparing a
form of type for the foundry which has to be stereotyped and then
distributed. The speed of the new machine will be from five to ten
times as great as that of type-setting, and if successful it will
enable an author to send his work to the stereotyper more easily than
he can write it with the pen. When all ambitious would-be authors are
let loose upon the world in this manner, what a flood of superfluous
literature we shall have and what will become of the superfluous
printers?

"_Printing in Colors_ has taken a potent move forward. By the new
process a thousand shades can be printed at on