The invention was a striking and interesting novelty and at once attracted the attention of scientific men as well as the general public. Its first public exhibition was about the latter part of January, 1878, before the Polytechnic Association of the American Institute, at New York. It spoke English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Hebrew with equal facility. It imitated the barking of a dog and crowing of a cock, and then catching cold, coughed and sneezed and wheezed until it is said a physician in the audience proposed sending a prescription for it. It was also suggested by an irreverent man that it might take the place of preachers in the rendition of sermons, while another thought that as it reproduced music with equal facility it might take the place of preacher and choir both. In the spring of 1878 it was exhibited at Washington by Edison and his assistant, Mr. Batchelor. Mr. Edison was the guest of Mr. U. H. Painter, and in his parlors it was shown to a party of gentlemen. From Mr. Painter’s house the machine was taken to the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, thence to the Academy of Sciences, in session at the Smithsonian Institution, and at night it was taken to the White House and exhibited to President and Mrs. Hayes. [Illustration: FIG. 189.--FIRST PHONOGRAPH.] The form of the first phonograph is shown in Fig. 189. It consisted of three principal parts--the mouthpiece A, into which speech was uttered, the spirally grooved cylinder B, carrying on its periphery a sheet of tin foil, and a second mouthpiece D. The cylinder B and its axial shaft were both provided with spiral grooves or screw threads of exactly the same pitch, and when the shaft was turned by its crank its screw threaded bearings caused the cylinder to slowly advance as it rotated. The mouthpiece A had adjacent to the cylinder a flexible diaphragm carrying a little point or stylus which bore against the tin foil on the cylinder. When the mouthpiece A was spoken into and the cylinder B was turned, the little stylus, vibrating from the voice impulses, traced by indentations a little jagged path in the tin foil that formed the record. To reproduce the record in speech again, the mouthpiece A was adjusted away from the cylinder, the cylinder run back to the starting point, and mouthpiece D was then brought up to the cylinder. This mouthpiece had a diaphragm and stylus similar to the other one, only more delicately constructed. This stylus was adjusted to bear lightly in the little spiral path in the tin foil traced by the other stylus, and as the tin foil revolved with the cylinder its jagged irregularities set up the same vibrations in the diaphragm of mouthpiece D as those caused by the voice on the other diaphragm, and thus translated the record into sounds of articulate speech, exactly corresponding to the words first spoken into the instrument. In Fig. 190 is shown a further development