Mechanics and the Voice.

Only a little while ago Thomas Alva Edison spoke from a talking film in New Zealand, page 10 and the modern perfection of that instrument is so great that people who had never met Edison at once felt as if they knew him. Not only a “wizard” was there, but, as one lady phrased it, “a dear old man” —perhaps the dearer in that he confessed that he did not understand the Einstein theory. A few weeks pass, and Edison, at eighty, passes to his fathers. It is characteristic of speeding progress that while Edison in the ‘eighties of last century was astonishing the world with his speaking machine, the latterday world takes for granted the wonderful speaking mechanism of the sound-sight moving pictures, which record the human voice, not with a phonograph needle but with a more wonderful contrivance still. Thus one invention inspires another, and the peoples of the world are more and more brought face to face.