The phonoscope (Nov 1896-Dec 1899)

The Phonoscope (Copyrighted, 1896) A Monthly Journal Devoted to Scientific and Amusement Inventions Appertaining to Sound and Sight Vol. I NEW YORK, JULY, 1897 No. S The brightest spot on Broadway at night is the Twenty-seventh Street corner where the Columbia Phonograph Company has its headquarters. The white building with ample frontage on both Broadway and Twenty-seventh Street is brilliantly illuminated with row upon row of incandescent lights and the interior of the building is also brightly lighted. The result is to bring the building out against the darkness of the night with an effect that attracts the notice and excites the admiration of every stroller on Broadwa}'. The whole of the large corner building is occupied by the Columbia Phonograph Company. Here are the executive offices of the Columbia Phonograph Company and the American Graphophone Company as well as the New York office. The New York office, so-called, occupies the main or ground floor as well as the basement and a part of the second floor. The whole of the main floor, arranged as one large room, is given up to exhibition purposes. It is very tastefully and effectively fitted up with electric lights and mirrors and is a most attractive place. In the centre is a brass-railed platform used for office purposes and for a neat display of goods. Around the room are arranged kinetoscopes and nickel -in-the-slot graphophones, supplied with the latest records. The exhibition parlor has come to be one of the recognized pleasure resorts of the city. The basement rooms accommodate the bookeepers of the New York office, a repair shop and the record department, where records are kept and sold. Generally two or three graphophones can be heard at a time reproducing musical records for customers, and there is a strange medley of sound issuing from the basement. On the second floor besides commodious salesrooms attached to the New York office are the offices of Mr. E. D. Easton, the President of the Columbia Phonograph Company and of the American Graphophone Company, Mr. Wm. H. Smith, the General Manager, and Mr. H. P. Godwin, the Manager of the advertising department. The upper floor of the building is devoted to the record-making department in charge of Mr. V. H. Emerson. Here all the interesting work of making talking-machine records can be studied daily. Bands, orchestras and soloists are constantly engaged playing and vocalists singing into the big horns making records which are shipped to all parts of the civilized world. Recently an operatic company has been employed singing operatic selections to be caught and preserved on the wax cylinders. The New York headquarters in general arrangement is much like the offices of the Company in St. Eouis, Washington, Philadelphia and other cities. It has been a feature of the Company's policy to make their buildings and exhibition rooms attractive. In carrying out this idea over seven hundred electric lights are used in and about the New York building and similar displays are made in other cities. The Columbia Phonograph Company is about to open European headquarters in Paris and will have a building there centrally located, which will remind visiting New Yorkers of the brilliantly illuminated building at Twentyseventh Street and Broadway. The development of the Columbia Phonograph Company and of the American Graphophone Company under Mr. Easton's direction has been rapid and remarkable. Until recently the headquarters were in Washington, but the extending business required a removal to New York, where, until a few months ago, an office was maintained as a branch office. Now New York is the center of the graphophone business and there are large buildings used as branch offices and salesrooms in many other cities, besides allied companies that handle the goods of the Columbia Phonograph Company. The Columbia Phonograph Company holds the relation to the American Graphophone Company of sole sales agent and for that reason perhaps its name is better known throughout the country than that of the American Graphophone Company, which is the Company that owns the patents and engages in manufacture of graphophones. The Graphophone Company owns and operates an extensive factory at Bridgeport, Conn., and contemplates adding another factory building to its plant in the near future. as a Zeachev The Latest Invasion of flachinery Man as the competitor of machinery has suffered rapid and successive defeats during the last fifty years, and, instead of gaining his anticipated larger freedom through invention, he has lost his whilom independence, and, driven from his Eden of Ease, curses the gods of his own creation. The tension is becoming too great to bear, and a crisis is inevitable reconciling man and machinery; that is, man individual with man universal. The significance of the radical changes involved in the substitution of machinery for man came to me with acute force when I considered the possible function of the phonograph as an educator— as directly teaching foreign languages, singing, elocution, etc. , delivering lectures on history, literature, science, and giving instruction in many fields of study. What a host of teachers, present and prospective, will be displaced and left industrially rudderless, when cylinders, freighted with learning in any department of human knowledge, may be purchased for a few cents each! All that is involved in the evolution of vocal communication is of the deepest importance to teachers, whether of speech or song, for they are vocal com municators, par excellence . A great danger threatens their continued existence as teacher, a danger that can not be averted by closing our ears or eyes to the portentous fact of the inevitable rise and reign of "mechanical" teaching. Their almost • complete displacement in rudimentary instruction, at least, seems to the writer to be a matter of only a few years. We shall do well to consider the prospect and see what is involved of the benefit and of malefit to mankind. Hypnotism has acquainted us with a vast, an unexplored, subconscious realm, which could, and, it seems to me, ought, to be utilized for educational purposes. The phonograph will be the first mechanical means for the conversion of this reservoir of force into beautiful mental forms. Note the fagged brains of civilized and especially of professional men! Does not their condition tell us how overstrained is their consciousness? Various facts of degeneration stare us in the face as an emphatic answer. Now, if we could but properly coordinate the conscious with the subconscious realm, how much rest and freedom would be given to consciousness! The monotonous iteration of the phonograph will subconsciously habituate the pupil to higher mental forms. In other words, it will organize in him, automatically and effortlessly, the modes and processes of things. It will be instrumental in bringing about that great disideratum, the coordination of the conscious and subconscious actions of the mind. The subconscious is the vital mechanism of the mind contributed to us by our entire past. It is, in short, habitude guided by hint. Every teacher seeks to cultivate mechanical expertness as a prerequisite to sustained voluntary and spontaneous action. The phonograph will furnish this work of pr elimination, that is, of preliminary formation. It will be utilized as a fashioner of new mental forms for the subsequent housing of the expanding soul.' I may overate the imminency, or the universality, of this change. However that may be, let me show that I have not been painting a fancy picture of its practicability, and of the value of the most patient teacher in the world. Some of the possibilities of the phonograph (and its variation, the graphophone) for the teaching of languages have been demonstrated by Prof. R. D. Cortina, of New York City. Without parade, for the last five years, he has taught various languages by phonograph, in all parts of the world, but especially in South America and in Mexico. Briefly, his method is as follows: He furnishes a text-book (say for Spaniards to learn English) arranged in twenty lessons. These lessons are also given in his own verse on twenty cylinders. Accompanying these voice-freighted cylinders are twenty blank ones. The professor delivers the graphophone, the express charges paid, for thirty dollars; a cylinder freighted with a lesson in any language, with a chapter or scene from comedy or a novel, or with a song or a ballad, for one dollar. Blank cylinders for the return messages or recitations cost twenty cents apiece; a text-book in any one of a dozen languages, $1.50. The pupil, thus equipped, opens the book at the first lesson; puts the tubes into his ears, and starts the machine slowly on its journey through the world of foreign sound. The eye follows the >