Page:Copyright, Its History And Its Law (1912).djvu/248

 symbols. Mr. Edison has himself made some experiments in this direction, though the confusion from the overtones, which give quality of speech, has so far prevented result. A large share of literary productivity to-day is by voice-dictation recorded mechanically by a stenographer on the typewriter or directly on the phonograph disc, and I may instance from personal experience a further step. As one of the committee for the Edison birthday dinner, commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his invention of the incandescent lamp, I was asked to supply some original verse, and it occurred to me to put this in shape by help of Mr. Edison's inventions, without direct or indirect handor typewriting. Accordingly I completed the verses mentally without use of paper and voiced them into an Edison phonograph, verifying this through the telephone, and the lines were set in type by the printer from the soundrecord, and thus printed on the menu for the dinner. Thus my formulated ideas were recorded through the nerves and other mechanism of the vocal organs, instead of through the nerves and other mechanism of the hand, directly by the phonograph point on the phonograph cylinder; and it seems a common-sense inference that if I had caused copies of the phonograph cylinder, though not legible in the ordinary sense, to be published instead of the secondary copies in print, I should be as much entitled to copyright protection in the one case as in the other. The ' telegraphone ' directly records on a steel tape the sounds of the human voice as sent through the telephone, and by an absolutely invisible re-arrangement of the magnetized particles of steel, makes a writing in which there is no possibility of visual legibility.

"Moreover, invention is now developing a series of reproducing mechanisms such as Dr. Cahill's '