The Wizard of Menlo Park has just succeeded after two years of hard application to the experiment in giving us the talking picture, a real genuine talking picture, wholly independent of the old device of having the actors talk behind the screen when the films were projected. By a combination of the phonograph and the moving picture machine working in perfect synchronism the result is obtained. Wires are attached to the mechanism of both the machines, the one behind the screen and the one in front, in such a way that the two are operated simultaneously so that when a film is projected a corresponding record on the phonograph acts in perfect unison supplying the voice suitable to the moving action. Men and women pass along the canvas, act, talk, laugh, cry and "have their being" just as in real life. Of course, they are immaterial, merely the reflection of films, but the one hundred thousandth of an inch thick, yet they give forth oral sounds as creatures of flesh and blood. In fact every sound is produced harmoniously with the action on the screen. An iron ball is dropped and you hear its thud upon the floor, a plate is cracked and you can hear the cracking just the same as if the material plate were broken in your presence. An immaterial piano appears upon the screen and a fleshless performer discourses airs as real as those heard on Broadway. Melba and Tettrazini and Caruso and Bonci appear before you and warble their nightingale notes, as if behind the footlights with a galaxy of beauty, wealth and fashion before them for an audience. True it is not even their astral bodies you are looking at, only their pictured representations, but the magic of their voices is there all the same and there is such an atmosphere of realism about the representations that you can scarcely believe the actors are not present in _propriae personae_. Mr. Edison had much study and labor of experiment in bringing his device to a successful issue. The greatest obstacle he had to overcome was in getting a phonograph that could "hear" far enough. At the beginning of the experiments the actor had to talk directly into the horn, which made the right kind of pictures impossible to get. Bit by bit, however, a machine was perfected which could "hear" so well that the actor could move at his pleasure within a radius of twenty feet. That is the machine that is being used now. This new combination of the moving picture machine and the phonograph Edison has named the _kinetophone_. By it he has made possible the bringing of grand opera into the hamlets of the West, and through it also our leading statesmen may address audiences on the mining camps and the wilds of the prairies where their feet have never trodden. CHAPTER V SKY-SCRAPERS AND HOW THEY ARE BUILT Evolution of the Sky-scraper--Construction--New York's Giant Buildings--Dimensions.