Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/466

450 The inventor has prepared a large and beautiful singing lustre, with a dozen or fifteen jets, which can be placed in the richest or most comfortable drawing-room. This lustre may be used at concerts or balls, for it can play all the airs in dance-music. It will be worked by electricity, so that the performer who plays may be seated in a neighboring room. The effect will be perfectly magical. The future has other surprises for us for our houses. The most unexpected applications of scientific principles are daily the result of the skillful efforts of learned men.

Without reckoning Prof. Tyndall, who is so well known and esteemed on the Continent, many other learned men, English, German, Austrian (like Shaffgotsche), and Frenchmen, have already studied singing-flames, but no one had previously thought of studying the effects produced by two or several flames brought together, till M. Kastner, who, by means of delicate combinations and ingenious mechanism, has produced the pyrophone.

Frederick Kastner, the inventor of the pyrophone, showed from his earliest age a very decided taste for scientific pursuits. His parents, whose fine fortune permitted them to satisfy the taste of their son for study, gave him facilities often denied to genius. They frequently traveled: the first thing which arrested his attention was a railway; this pleased him much; he had a passion for locomotives, just as some children have for horses. He was only three years old when he examined the smallest details with a lively feeling of curiosity. Later on, when he tried to reason and explain his impressions, he overwhelmed with questions those who surrounded him, wishing to learn the mechanism of these great machines, and the mysterious force which sets them to work. But, what more especially charmed him was, when the train stopped at the station, the fiery aspect of the jets of gas emerging suddenly from the darkness. At this sight he shouted with delight; such was his enthusiasm, that he seemed as if he would jump out of the arms of those who held him, in order to rush toward the jets of flames, which exercised upon him a sort of fascination.

Steam and gas, in their modern application to locomotion and lightning, were the first scientific marvels which struck the mind and the sense of the child. He studied music under the skillful direction of his father. From the age of fifteen years, in studying gas particularly, his attention was directed to singing-flames. The mysteries of electricity were also at this time the object of his study. The researches to which he gave himself up carried him on to invent a novel application of electricity as a motive force. He patented this invention. On the 17th of March, 1873, the Baron Larrey, member of the Academy of Sciences of Paris, presented to the Institut de France young Kastner's first memoir on singing-flames, which laid down the following new principle: