But let us go back a little: In 1845, Chas. Bourseuil of France published the idea that the vibrations of speech uttered against a diaphragm might break or make an electric contact, and the electric pulsations thereby produced might set another diaphragm vibrating which should produce the transmitted sound waves. In 1857, another Frenchman, Leon Scott, patented in France his _Phonautograph_--an instrument consisting of a large barrel-like mouth-piece into which words were spoken, a membrane therein against which the voice vibrations were received, a stylus attached to this vibrating membrane, and a rotating cylinder covered with blackened paper, against which the stylus bore and on which it recorded the sound waves in exact form received on the vibrating diaphragm. Then came the researches and publications of Helmholtz and König on acoustic science, 1862-1866. Then young Philip Reis of Frankfort, Germany, attempted to put all these theories into an apparatus to reproduce speech, but did not quite succeed. Then in 1874-1875, Bell took up the matter, and at the Philadelphia exhibition, 1876, astonished the world by the revelations of the telephone. In April, 1877, Charles Cros, a Frenchman, in a communication to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, after describing an apparatus like the Scott phonautograph, set forth how traced undulating lines of voice vibrations might be reproduced in intaglio or in relief, and reproduced upon a vibrating membrane by a pointed stylus attached thereto and following the line of the original pulsations. The communication seems to have been pigeon-holed, and not read in open session until December, 1877, and until after Thomas A. Edison had actually completed and used his phonograph in the United States. Cros rested on the suggestion. Edison, without knowing of Cros’ suggestion, was first to make and actually use the same invention. Edison’s cylinder, on which the sounds were recorded and from which they were reproduced, was covered by tin foil. A great advance was made by Dr. Chichester A. Bell and Mr. C. S. Tainter, who in 1886 patented in the United States means of cutting or engraving the sound waves in a solid body. The solid body they employed was a thin pasteboard cylinder covered with wax. This apparatus they called the _graphophone_. Two years thereafter, Mr. Emile Berliner of Washington had invented the _gramophone_, which consists in etching on a metallic plate the record of voice waves. He has termed his invention, “the art of etching the human voice.” He prepares a polished metal plate, generally zinc, with an extremely thin coating of film or fatty milk, which dries upon and adheres to the plate. The stylus penetrates this film, meeting from it the slightest possible resistance, and traces thereon the message. The record plate is then subjected to a particularly constituted acid bath, which, entering the groove or grooves formed by the stylus, cuts or etches the same into the plate.