Even if Thomas Edison had not done wonders with electric lighting, telephones, electric torpedoes, new processes for separating iron from its ore, telegraphy, animated photography, and other things too numerous to mention, he would still have made for himself an enduring name as the inventor of the Phonograph. He has fitly been called the “Wizard of the West” from his genius for conjuring up out of what would appear to the multitude most unpromising materials startling scientific marvels, among which none is more truly wizard-like than the instrument that is as receptive of sound as the human ear, and of illimitable reproducing power. By virtue of its elfishly human characteristic, articulate speech, it occupies, and always will occupy, a very high position as a mechanical wonder. When listening to a telephone we are aware of the fact that the sounds are immediate reproductions of a living person’s voice, speaking at the moment and at a definite distance from us; but the phonographic utterances are those of a voice perhaps stilled for ever, and the difference adds romance to the speaking machine. The Phonograph was born in 1876. As we may imagine, its appearance created a stir. A contributor to the _Times_ wrote in 1877: “Not many weeks have passed since we were startled by the announcement that we could converse audibly with each other, although hundreds of miles apart, by means of so many miles of wire with a little electric magnet at each end. “Another wonder is now promised us--an invention purely mechanical in its nature, by means of which words spoken by the human voice can be, so to speak, stored up and reproduced at will over and over again hundreds, it may be thousands, of times. What will be thought of a piece of mechanism by means of which a message of any length can be spoken on to a plate of metal--that plate sent by post to any part of the world and the message absolutely respoken in the very voice of the sender, purely by mechanical agency? What, too, shall be said of a mere machine, by means of which the old familiar voice of one who is no longer with us on earth can be heard speaking to us in the very tones and measure to which our ears were once accustomed?”