In this respect he was most
like General Washington, who, though losing more battles than he gained,
learned to 'snatch victory from the jaws of defeat,' and win immortal
success.
"Some of Edison's discoveries were dramatic and amusing. During his
telephone experiments he learned the power of a diaphragm to take up
sound vibrations, and he had made a little toy that, when you talked
into the funnel, would start a paper man sawing wood. Then he came to
the conclusion that if he could record the movements of the diaphragm
well enough he could cause such records to reproduce the movements
imparted to them by the human voice.
"But in place of using a disk, he got up a small machine with a cylinder
provided with grooves around the surface. Over this some tinfoil was to
be placed and he gave it to an assistant to construct. Edison had but
little faith that it would work, but he said he wanted to get up a
machine that would 'talk back.' The assistant thought it was ridiculous
to expect such a thing, but he went ahead and followed the directions
given him. Edison has told of this:
"'When it was finished and the foil was put on, I shouted a verse of
"Mary had a little lamb" into the crude little machine. Then I adjusted
the reproducer, which when he began to operate it, proceeded to grind
out--
"'Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go'
"with the very quality and tones of my voice! We were never so taken back
in our lives.
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