"Phonograph" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... His official residence was most interesting. The main room was very high to beams and a grass-thatched roof, with a well-brushed earth floor covered with mats. It contained comfortable furniture, a small library, a good phonograph, tables, lamps and the like. When the mountain chill descended, Horne lit a fire in a coal-oil can with a perforated bottom. What little smoke was produced by the clean burning wood lost itself far aloft. Leopard skins and other trophies hung on the wall. We dined in another ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... country round to attend a concert. Men who look as though they had driven a grocery wagon, or like occupation, sit and listen so attentively and with such evident enjoyment. I am sure the circulation of the phonograph records has much to do with America's present wonderful ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... cleanliness and a few other things. He had the log walls painted white with the lead and oil that were intended for his York boats. Certain partitions were torn down, and new ones were built. The Indian wife of his chief runner made curtains for the windows, and he confiscated a small phonograph that should have gone on to Lac la Biche. He had no doubts, and he counted the days ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... had started the phonograph in the library, and it was playing gloomily, "Shall we meet beyond the river?" At Sperry's request we stopped talking and composed ourselves, and Herbert, I remember, took a tablet of some sort, to our intense annoyance, ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... phonograph in all of us, but in the sort of eminent person who makes public speeches about education and reading, and who gives away prizes and opens educational institutions, there seems to be ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... This is the latest improved telegraphone, a little electromagnetic wizard in a box, which we detectives are now using to take down and 'can' telephone conversations and other records. It is based on an entirely new principle in every way different from the phonograph. It was discovered by an inventor several years ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... country had become more and more costly, or narrow and impossible. The disappearance of vicar and squire, the extinction of the general practitioner by the city specialist; had robbed the village of its last touch of culture. After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book, schoolmaster, and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage. In the country were neither means of being clothed nor fed (according ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... met her. He sat alongside of her in an agony of confused Bliss, with a Temperature of 104 and the Vocal Chords entirely paralyzed. And yet, as a rule, he was just as reliable as a Phonograph. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... the hospital is still very heavy. The wards are bare and repellant and the days are long and dreary for the sick men. We do all we can to cheer them up, have phonograph concerts, magic lantern shows, with the magic missing, and baby organ recitals. The results are often ludicrous, but the appreciation of the men for our slightest effort is so hearty that ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... go and ask your aunt if you can go out with me and find a bird? I believe you would choose a good one. Louise and Lottie can make a fuss if they want to but I never said a word when they bought a phonograph and a bird will be more company for an ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... who read the report, and who really lamented the omission, whispered to me the reason of it. Through the negligence of persons representing Edison, no proper exhibition of his inventions had been made to the committee. They had learned that his agent was employed in showing the phonograph in a distant hall on the boulevards to an audience who paid an admission fee; but, although they had tried two or three times to have his apparatus shown them, they had been unsuccessful, until at last, from a feeling of ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... connected with defense work to give musical programs and to suggest that the plants begin each day's activities with playing the Star-spangled Banner—to tell the men what they are working for. 2. To conduct community sings in large cities. 3. To collect phonograph records for the boys in army camps, establishing central depots in every locality in the country. 4. To give talks, with song illustrations, on the history of the United States of America in colleges, high schools, women's clubs, and ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... efforts to make the phonograph reproduce the aspirated sound, and added: "From eighteen to twenty hours a day for the last seven months I have worked on this single word 'specia.' I said into the phonograph, 'specia, specia, specia,' but the instrument responded, ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... my Local-Veto Speech; and here is an entirely new view of the Home-Rule question. If you like to come over to my house at Clapham—close by, you know, busses every ten minutes—you shall have a night's thorough enjoyment. Leave you in the room by yourself with the phonograph. Pop in one of these cylinders; set the phonograph whizzing; and you'll hear me on Local Veto. Take out cylinder, put in another, and you'll know more about Home Rule in five minutes than you ever ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... simple in their mechanism as they are astonishing in their results, have been given to a delighted world. Some of Edison's inventions have a character at present of little more than picturesque playfulness, such as the Phonograph, perhaps the most remarkable of these minor inventions; the Aerophone, by which sounds are amplified without loss of distinctness; the Megaphone, an instrument which, inserted in the ear, so magnifies sounds that faint whispers may be heard a thousand ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... lift up the mind to know God and the heart to love Him, and in so doing we serve Him—the three things for which we were created. If we do not think of God we do not pray. A parrot might be taught to say the "Our Father," but it could never pray, because it has no mind to lift up. A phonograph can be made to say the prayers, but not to pray, for it has neither mind nor heart. So praying does not depend upon the words we say, but upon the way in which we say them. Indeed the best prayer, called meditation, is made when we do not ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... the last time we would all ever be together. He furnished us with all the drinkables we could get away with, including some very choice Johnny Walker. There was a lot of canned stuff, mostly sardines. Mr. Blofeld loaned us the officers' phonograph. ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... a grand parlor, Hiram thought. There was a piano, a phonograph, a whatnot filled with specimens of quartz, and four cloth-covered cushion rockers. With rattlesnake fairness the one Hiram chose squeaked a warning before it tried to land him on ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... full swing, Bob had an inspiration. He took off his headphones and clamped them on to the phonograph that stood on a table near by. Instantly the music became intensified and filled the room. When all their hands were on the wire, it became so loud that they had to close the doors of ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... had said, and was about to say more, when Mabel returned alone. Her eyes were brilliant with anger. Children can occasionally put the feats of the best constructed phonograph completely in the shade; everything that Caffyn had told her about that unfortunate burnt letter Dolly had just ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... politely. McAllen settled back in the chair, removed his glasses and half closed his eyes. Barney let his gaze rove. The furnishings of the house were what he had expected—well-tended, old, declining here and there to the downright shabby. The only reasonably new piece in the study was a radio-phonograph. The walls of the study and of the section of a living room he could see through a small archway were lined with crammed bookshelves. At the far end of the living room was a curious collection of clocks in various types and sizes, mainly antiques, but also some odd metallic pieces with modernistic ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... incident will determine what incidents to exclude. The world is full of incidents—enough to make volumes more than we now have. A phonograph and a camera could gather enough any day at a busy corner in a city to fill a volume; yet these pictures and these bits of conversation, interesting as each in itself might be, would not be a unit,—not one story, but many. Few persons, indeed, would write anything so disjointed as ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the cottage were clean and light, supplied with books and pictures, simple toys, and a phonograph. The yard was one wide green and golden play-ground, and all day the music of children's glad crooning and the singing of girls went echoing and trembling through the trees, as they played and sewed and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... McCoul," said the cook, "when he wass going to Norway." His English was not thick, but all clear-cut, as though it came from a phonograph. ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... is in the refrigerating rooms ready to be made into beef extract. Every drop of blood is saved in this factory, being dried and made into chicken feed or something else that is useful. Chicago, however, goes Fray Bentos one better for there you know the squeal is caught by the phonograph and the records ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... had a little lamb," for possibly the thousandth time since she had learned to do it early in her junior year. Emily Davis delivered her famous temperance lecture. Madeline sang her French songs, Jane Drew did her ever-popular "hen-act," and Nancy Simmons gave "Home, Sweet Home," as sung into a phonograph by Madame Patti on her tenth ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... him short with the remark, "Look here, old chappie" (that is the nearest translation of the original Greek term of familiarity): "when you can bring me the solution of this little mystery of the three nines I shall be happy to listen to your treatise, and, in fact, record it on my phonograph for ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... temperature, media, and other conditions; they ripple, spread, percolate, everywhere; they penetrate and saturate all solids and gases, yet are palpable corporeally only to the tympanum of the ear, and mechanically (as yet) only to the diaphragm of the phonograph. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... in a refined manner with cards and music, the latter being emitted from a phonograph which I was asked to attend to and upon which I reproduced many of their quaint North American folksongs, such as "Everybody Is Doing It," which has a rare native rhythm. At ten o'clock, it being noticed by the three ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... different from the everlasting hospital barracks: glowing lights, holiday decorations, the scent of flowers instead of the stale fumes of ether and disinfectants; soul-stirring music in place of the wheezy old phonograph grinding out the same old tunes; and, above all, girls, hundreds of them, circling in a bewildering rainbow of ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... her husband's company she was as dumb as a broken phonograph; when he was not with her she talked continuously, as if to get even. A call from Matilda Dean was one of the additional trials which made Mother's invalid state ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Philatelist filatelisto. Philately filatelo. Philologist filologiisto. Philology filologio. Philosopher filozofo. Philosophise filozofii. Philosophy filozofio. Phlegm flegmo, muko. Phlegmatic flegma. Phoenix fenikso. Phonetic fonetika. Phonograph fonografo. Phosphorus fosforo. Photograph fotografajxo. Photographer fotografisto. Photography fotografarto. Phrase frazero. Phraseology frazeologio. Phthisis ftizo. Phthisical ftiza. Physic kuracilo. Physical fizika. Physician ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... and Bert jumped up to start the phonograph, and that was like a band wagon to the little fellows, who liked to hear the popular tunes called off by the funny man in the big ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Country • Laura Lee Hope
... this tube, a sort of phonograph Which acts directly on my mind,—it does, you needn't laugh! I do not have to think at all, for, as I pull this chain, My wonderful machine transmits ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... fur-trimmed man, taken somewhat aback. "I beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell for a ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... nineteenth century type; the same bright light, the same pleasant deglutition, the same hum of conversation; but, approaching, you discover each diner has a little drum-shaped body under his chin—his phonograph. So he dines and babbles at his ease. In the smoking-room he substitutes his anecdote record. I imagine, too, the suburban hostess meeting the new maiden: "I hope, dear, you have brought a lot of conversation," just as now she asks for the ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... a mechanical imagination, and no other kind, begin to suggest the talking moving picture at this point, or the phonograph or the mechanical piano. Let us discuss the talking moving picture only. That disposes of ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... wish to burn the town," said one man; "but the orders were orders of war." He recounted that four Uhlans entered his house with a bow, and a knock at the door, politely helped themselves to his cellar, drank a toast to his wife, put his chairs in the street, and sat there playing his phonograph. They said they were sorry, but the house must be burnt. But before pouring on the naphtha and lighting the flame they freed his canary bird. Verhagen and the priest agreed that fright brought on an attack to a woman about to become a mother, ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... Force. Centrifugal Force. Capillary Attraction. The Sap of Trees. Sound. Acoustics. Sound Mediums. Vibration. Velocity of Sound. Sound Reflections. Resonance. Echos. Speaking Trumpet. The Stethoscope. The Vitascope. The Phonautograph. The Phonograph. Light. The Corpuscular Theory. Undulatory Theory. Luminous Bodies. Velocity of Light. Reflection. Refraction. Colors. The Spectroscope. ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... and write me how things are going. Do not use soap again when you wash the shell in the aquarium. If the parrot becomes lonesome—you can always tell because he goes back to swearing—let him hear the phonograph for half an hour night and morning, if you are too busy to ring the dinner bell to amuse him. Be careful about the gas—so many girls are dying that way now—but whatever you do, do not neglect the parrot; he is ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... in schools? Then you ought to see some real schools. Did you ever go to a school to listen to a phonograph?" Then, turning to the farmers: "Did you ever go to school to get your horses shod? You go to school for both in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. They're the greatest schools I have ever seen. They run from seven in ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... in a whisper, so lost on Larry, who had just turned to speak with the phonograph exhibitor now ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... it quite differently, and left me wondering which version was the better. He could not repeat himself if he tried, whereas most of the renowned talkers I have met will go over the old impression with the certainty of a phonograph. ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... said Uncle John. "They'll combine the phonograph with the pictures, for one thing, so that the players, instead of being silent, will speak as clearly as in real life. Then we'll have the grand operas, by all the most famous singers, elaborately staged; and we'll be able to see and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... girl Florry went shopping with her. Sports clothes? Wow! Wow! White skirts, blue jersey, little sailor hat—man—oh, man, the stage is set to the last detail! I even had them ship a piano. Doris plays the guitar and has a pleasing voice, and just for good measure I threw in a crackajack cabinet phonograph and a hundred records with enough sentimental drip ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... a phonograph can try a very interesting and amusing experiment without going to any expense. Remove the belt and replace with a longer one, which can be made of narrow braid or a number of strands of yarn. The new belt should be long ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... Years afterwards, when Mrs. Stevenson was living in San Francisco after the death of her husband, two of her friends, Doctor and Mrs. Russell Cool, went to Tahiti, and were commissioned by her to visit Chief Ori a Ori. The Cools took with them a phonograph and themselves made records of a speech by Ori to Mrs. Stevenson, which, with its translation, was afterwards reproduced for her in San Francisco. But let us hear Mrs. Cool's own ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... will enjoy singing good hymns, he may purchase a few records for the phonograph, for example, "O Come All Ye Faithful," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "O Zion Haste," "Holy, Holy, Holy," "Abide with Me." These will suit those of from ten upward; younger children will enjoy "Can a Little Child ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... and there was no one at his bungalow, to which his broken ankle confined him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin his share of the enormous labors that evidently lay before the rulers of the world. I wrote shorthand, and as there was not even a phonograph available, I went in so soon as his ankle had been dressed, and sat at his desk to write at his dictation. It is characteristic of the odd slackness that went with the spasmodic violence of the old epoch, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Some there are who have spent their lives searching for gold by the light of the Aurora Borealis and others who have delved for diamonds on the South African veldt. Some have ridden range on the plains of Texas and others on the plains of Queensland. When, in the recreation huts, the phonograph plays "Home, Sweet Home" the thoughts of some drift to nipa-thatched huts on flaming tropic islands, some think of tin-roofed wooden cottages in the environs of Sydney or Melbourne, others of staid, old-fashioned, red-brick houses in Halifax ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... don't know, honey," answered the colored cook. "Dat's why I comed in heah to tell yo' mamma. I 'spects, Mrs. Bobbsey, dat we'd better phonograph fo' ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope
... more of this," Dick said to Norris, as they tramped home late on the night before election, and felt a certain restfulness in the November starlight, "I should send down a wheezing nasal phonograph to grind out my speech. I am played out. Everything ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Diaphragms:—Sound waves in air have the power to move other diaphragms than that of the ear. Sound waves constantly vibrate such diaphragms as panes of windows and the walls of houses. The recording diaphragm of a phonograph is a window pane bearing a stylus adapted to engrave a groove in a record blank. In the cylinder form of record, the groove varies in depth with the vibrations of the diaphragm. In the disk type of phonograph, the groove varies sidewise from ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... thought of him he shrank from the idea of going to him with a real heart trouble or with a genuine mental difficulty. He would as soon have thought of telling his personal griefs or sorrows into a phonograph. And yet President Davis of Burrton was a church member, a highly educated gentleman, a great money getter from rich men, and had the reputation in the educational world of being a success as such school presidents go. He could extract half a million for Burrton from some great ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... young folks gather 'round in the good old-fashioned way, Singin' all the latest songs gathered from the newest play, Or they start the phonograph an' shove the chairs back to the wall An' hold a little party dance, I'm happiest of all. Then I sorter settle back, plumb contented to the core, An' I tell myself most proudly, that's what ...
— When Day is Done • Edgar A. Guest
... in different parts of the globe. Upon the invention of the telegraph, another invention—that of the telephone—has followed, by which conversation can be held with the voice between distant places. By the phonograph it has become possible to reproduce audibly songs, speeches, and conversations. Still more recently a system of wireless telegraphy has been invented by which messages may be sent even across the Atlantic without the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... present, just as the latter doubtless regard with pitying indulgence that school which, only a few years ago, in the person of one of its most famous members, Dr. Bouillaud, mercilessly condemned the exponent of Edison's invention, because the savant, listening to a phonograph for the first time, could not believe that it was anything else than ventriloquism! Instances of this kind are sufficiently numerous and recent not to be forgotten, in spite of ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... is bent so on creation, Folks haven't time to talk or sing or cry or even laugh. But if you take the notion to want some such emotion, They've got it all on tap fur you, right in the phonograph. ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... dreams) to long conversations between my father and mother in the old drawing-room at Passy, while Gogo was absorbed in his book; and every word that had passed through Gogo's inattentive ears into his otherwise preoccupied little brain had been recorded there as in a phonograph, and was now repeated over and over again for Peter Ibbetson, as he sat unnoticed ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... printed bulletin, stating, for example—"Prayed on the 10th of March, at four o'clock in the afternoon, John A. Dowie." If the patient was not in Chicago, Dowie would pray by telephone, so that the immediate effect of the divine power might be felt. He also made use of a phonograph for recording his homilies, sermons and prayers, and these records were sent, at a fixed price, to his adherents in all parts ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... explained his change of base by saying that the cattle feed was a little better at his new camp! Mind you this: at the Narossara the feed was quite good enough, the oxen were doing no work, there was companionship, books, papers, and even a phonograph to while away the long weeks until our return. N'gombe Brown quite cheerfully deserted all this to live in solitude where he imagined the ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... electrolyzing moles—to what end? Looking handsome. Oh, what a mistake! It's the larynx that the beauty doctors ought to work on. It's words more than warts, talk more than talcum, palaver more than powder, blarney more than bloom that counts—the phonograph instead of the photograph. But I was going to ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... wire. He let 'em laugh, but we have the telegraph. Folks laughed at Edison, when he said he could take the human voice—or any other sound—and fix it on a wax cylinder or a hard-rubber plate—but he did it, and we have the phonograph. And folks laughed at Santos Dumont, at the Wrights, and at all the other fellows, who said they could take a heavier-than-air machine, and skim above the clouds like a bird; but we do it—I've done it—you've ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... know somewhere in the give-and-take of talk that he was a railway telegraph operator, and that, given his first long vacation, an old impulse, come down from the days of the Hawaiian hula phonograph records, had brought him to the isle of delight. He was disappointed in it. One could see in his candid eyes that he felt himself done out of an illusion, an illusion of continuous dancing by girls in rope skirts on moonlit beaches. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hurt that I wouldn't tell anybody about it but you, dear, but last night as he walked home with me, after we had been dancing down at Sue's to the new phonograph, he—he put his arm almost around me and I think—I think he was going to kiss me if I hadn't prevented him—that is, he did kiss my hair—I think." Edith is the pale-nun type, and I wish she could have seen how lovely she was with the blush that even the failure ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... humorous glance at Mr. Keen; and the two men stood up until she had vanished, then reseated themselves vis-a-vis. Mr. Keen calmly dropped his elbow on the concealed button which prepared a hidden phonograph for the reception of every ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... with their voice organs, but simply because, as they cannot hear the sounds they make, they do not form them by practice into words and sentences. By proper training, deaf mutes can now be taught to speak, though their voices sound flat and "tinny," like a phonograph. ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... his genius for making practical application of the ideas of others. However, it was Alexander Graham Bell, long a Smithsonian Regent and friend of its third Secretary S. P. Langley, who, with his Volta Laboratory associates made practical the phonograph, which has been called Edison's most ...
— Development of the Phonograph at Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory • Leslie J. Newville
... with a half dozen hours to pass ere we proceeded to sea. It was Sunday, so we were idle, the four of us lounging on the lower bridge deck—the Captain, Briggs, myself, and this human phonograph. It was a pleasant day, and we would have enjoyed the loaf in the warm afternoon sunshine, had it not been for the unending drivel of the passenger. I enjoyed it anyway, for even though the ears be filled with a buzzing, ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... doing by accident," was the reply, "nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead on it and make trial after trial until it comes. I have always kept strictly within the lines of commercially useful inventions. I have never had any time to put on electrical wonders, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of course; a phonograph with expensive records, so that Caruso and McCormack and Elman were household words; a sturdy, middle-class automobile, in which Bella lolled red-faced in a lacy and beribboned boudoir cap when they drove into town. On a Saturday afternoon you ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... the honours of his telephonic discovery and of his astonishing phonograph, Edison offered me his arm and took me to the dining-room, where I found his family assembled. I was very tired, and did justice to the supper that had been so hospitably prepared ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... of the Englishman it stopped, nodded its head three or four times, and slowly opened its mouth. There was a sharp, whirring noise, such as comes from a phonograph, and ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... had been bothered by rheumatism in his shoulder. The return now to the steady use of the pen aggravated his trouble, and at times he was nearly disabled. The phonograph for commercial dictation had been tried experimentally, and Mark Twain was always ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... when the steward had cleared the table, this hoary old relic of man-killing and man-driving days, battered waif of the sea that he was, carried in from his room a most splendid collection of phonograph records. These, and the machine, he placed on the table. The big doors were opened, making the dining-room and the main cabin into one large room. It was in the cabin that Captain West and I lolled in big leather chairs while Mr. Pike ran the phonograph. His face was in ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... not quite clear to Miska either just why the poor Lieutenant kept clamoring so frightfully for his talking-machine. All he knew was that the officers had been sitting under cover, listening to the Rakoczy March on the phonograph, when suddenly that accursed shell burst upon them and everything disappeared in smoke and earth. He himself had been knocked unconscious by a heavy board which came out of a clear sky and hit him on the back. He had fallen flat and it was an eternity before he got his breath ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... that he made love to you and proposed to you through a phonograph? You know I had some sort of idea that love that was all wool, and a yard wide, and meant business, usually got ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... ago in our home we came across a long-unused phonograph. We started it going, placing upon it one of the cylinders which had been packed away with the phonograph, and were startled to hear the voice of one who had been dead for years. We heard the message he dictated, the song in which he joined and the laugh with ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... at the service of men. You know how prolific the American mind has been in invention; how much civilization has been advanced by the steamboat, the cotton-gin, the sewing-machine, the reaping-machine, the typewriter, the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph. Do you know, have you had occasion to learn, that there is no hospitality for invention nowadays? There is no encouragement for you to set your wits at work to improve the telephone, or the camera, or some piece of machinery, or some ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... repetition of a prepared program taken verbatim from some paper or leaflet. It is, of course, better to have the pupils recite this leaflet or list of statements than it would be to have it ground out of a phonograph. The program should be prepared by the pupils ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... said Nan. "Mollie is a talking doll. I guess she has a little phonograph inside her. Maybe that's the noise Johnnie heard when the gypsy man carried the doll past him, and Johnnie thought it was ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island • Laura Lee Hope
... inventions, the phonograph, the camera and the telephone, both wire and wireless, make the work of Nature, as manifested in our bodies, a simple, childish affair, fit only for the kindergarten ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... greatest wonders of the 19th century were the invention of photography, solar spectral analysis, the radiometer, the phonograph, the photophone; in public affairs, the reunion of the old and new school Presbyterian Churches, and the disappearance, by civil war, of negro ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... not knowing exactly what to say he had heard, but his vagueness, the very eloquence of his hesitation, caused Allie's face to light up. This was the second compliment paid her since her arrival at the Notch, therefore when the phonograph resumed its melodious measures she yielded herself with abandon to the arms of her partner, and her red lips were parted, her somber eyes were shining. That day she began ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... that no veil of uncertainty hangs between us and the lapse of Anne Boleyn from the throne to the scaffold; we see Catherine Howard as in an instantaneous photograph escaping from her prison-chamber and running through the gallery to implore the mercy of Henry at mass in the chapel, and, as if a phonograph were reporting them, we hear the wretched woman's screams when she is pursued and seized and carried back, while the king continues devoutly in the chapel at prayer. The little life of Edward VI. relates itself as distinctly to the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... "self-made men," and is justly proud of many whom it thus designates. In one sense no man is self-made who breathes the air of a civilized community. In another sense every man who is anything other than a phonograph on legs is self-made. But if we award his just praise to the man who has attained any kind of excellence without having had the same advantages as others whom, nevertheless, he has equalled or surpassed, let us not be betrayed into undervaluing the mechanic's careful ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... been awake all night," said Mr. Rand suddenly. "Now, couldn't you just tuck in somehow and sleep a wink or two? You won't get a chance when you see Betty. She's a regular phonograph—friendship's her key." ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... over and went into the little apothecary. The clerk was sitting on the back of his neck with his feet to a counter listening to the phonograph. "Has anybody here seen Kelly?" the machine screeched as the stranger entered. The clerk got up and ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... the world if it doesn't look like a set of big phonograph records!" exclaimed the man. He drew one of the objects out and very carefully ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... more external to ourselves. They are fundamentally a matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called theoretical, is, like a mechanical discovery—that of the steam-engine, the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane—a thing which is useful for something else. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she, wherefore is she useful to us? A man takes an electric tram to go to hear an opera, and asks himself, Which, in ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... day: a wonderful book he called it, one of the three great biographies of the world, Plato's dialogues with Socrates as hero and Boswell's "Life of Johnson" being the other two. It was strange, he thought, that the greatest man had written the worst biography; Plato made of Socrates a mere phonograph, into which he talked his own theories: Renan did better work, and Boswell, the humble loving friend, the least talented of the three, did better still, though being English, he had to keep to the surface of things and leave the depths to be divined. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... recommend it, either as an introduction to the subject or as a satisfactory manual for those who have no time for perusing a larger work. It contains an excellent description, with diagrams, of Faber's Talking Machine and of Edison's Talking Phonograph, which can not fail to be interesting to any reader who takes an interest in the marvelous progress of ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... ingenuity has devastated all nature's countenance and resources with "improvements," cut down all the trees to make houses of, and turned all the green waterways into horse-power for machinery. Then we shall have cotton-mill epics, phonograph elegies from the tops of tall buildings; and then ragtime music, which interprets that divine art only for vulgar heels and toes, will take the place of anthems and ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... several days dining with friends, conferring with Edwards and the directors of the New Opinion, and slowly shaping his "experiences abroad" into phonograph records that played themselves automatically under ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... is a 'word-for-word' device," said he, pointing to a swiftly revolving dial within the box. "On one face of that dial are some ten thousand word-images, made by vibration, after the phonograph method. Directly opposite, on the other face, are the corresponding words in the other language. The disk is rotating at such an enormous speed that, for all practical purposes, any word which may chance to be spoken will ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... quite shares their nectar and ambrosia. He as it were catches echoes of the talk of the Immortals,—the turn of their phrase, the intonation of their utterance,—and straightway reproduces it with the fidelity of the phonograph. But, as in the phonograph, we find something lacking; our mind accepts the report as genuine, but our ear affirms an unreality; this is reproduction, indeed, but not creation. Bulwer himself, when his fit is past, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... her in the main salon. Cleigh, senior, stood before the phonograph listening to Caruso. The roll of the yacht in nowise disturbed the mechanism of the instrument. There was no sudden sluing of the needle, due to an amateurish device which Cleigh himself had constructed. The son, stooping, was searching the titles of ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... his nation, Mr. Clinch described his landing on those enchanted shores, viz, the Rhine Whirlpool and Hell Gate, East River, New York. He described the railways, tram-ways, telegraphs, hotels, phonograph, and telephone. An occasional oath broke from the baron, but he listened attentively; and in a few moments Mr. Clinch had the raconteur's satisfaction of seeing the vast hall slowly filling with open-eyed and open-mouthed retainers hanging upon his words. Mr. Clinch went on to describe his ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... it to be comfortable and happy, I mean. They aren't really poor, any of them, except, perhaps, Miss Flora. She is a little hard up, poor soul. Bless her heart! I wonder what she'll get first, Niagara, the phonograph, or something to eat without looking at the price. Did I ever write you about those "three ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... monotony, but the details of the rigid, unnatural countenance, the fixed staring eyes, were still clear. Redly varnished chairs with green plush cushions and elaborate, thread antimacassars, a second table ranged against the wall, bearing a stout volume entitled "A Cloud of Witnesses," and a cheap phonograph, completed the furnishing. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... days after this incident the polar night began to shut down in grim earnest. Sometimes for days the boys and the other adventurers would be confined to the huts. Entertainments were organized and phonograph concerts given, and, when it was possible to venture out, hunting trips in a neighboring seal-ground were attempted. All these things helped to while away the monotony of the long darkness. In the meantime the commanders of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... soon and that there must be seventy-five thousand orders by the date of issue, "not a single one short of that." Then suddenly, at the end of February, the rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly hold the pen. He conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and wrote Howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three months, with cylinders enough to carry one ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the engine house to us, and we make our bow for the first time as benefactors to the cause of progress and enlightenment. Andy makes an hour-and-a-half speech on the subject of irrigation in Lower Egypt, and we have a moral tune on the phonograph and ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... the way to the small parlour where he placed in action on the phonograph a record said to contain the ravings of John McCullough in his last hours. He listened to ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... books, magazines and scribble-pads, there was room on the big reading stand for matches, cigarettes, an ash-tray, and a thermos bottle. A phonograph, for purposes of dictation, stood on a hinged and swinging bracket. On the wall, under the barometer and thermometers, from a round wooden frame laughed the face of a girl. On the wall, between the rows of buttons and a switchboard, from an open holster, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... alarm. When he reappeared he was carrying a table on which was some large, heavy article hidden under a tablecloth. "There's a little surprise coming to you and the rest," he resumed. "You did not know, madame, that when I was pressing you with questions as you sat in my dental chair a phonograph was making a record of your answers." He whipped off the cover of the talking machine and busied himself with preparing it ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... are phonograph records made on purpose to be used by beginners. Perhaps your father will get you some of those. It is a fine way to learn, training your ear to the sounds and giving ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... I admitted, "may have paralyzed most of my faculties, but as a repeater of messages verbatim, I am faithful as a phonograph." ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... think only beautiful thoughts, see beautiful things, dream beautiful dreams, hear beautiful music. I'm going to make you climb these mountain peaks with me for the next three months and live among the clouds. I'm going to refit your room with new furniture and pictures and place in it a phonograph with the best music. When you are strong enough you can work for me three hours a day as my secretary. You use ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... They all fell beneath my faithful hammering; And then—my pretty neighbor across the street Put in a player-piano that could tear a hole Through classics that I'd never learned even to dent! I was mad—hopping mad— But I got even with her. (She was studying for the operatic stage.) I bought a phonograph—cheap— And some records—not cheap. They made her gargling voice Sound like an imitation with a small i. Then we both laughed—and quit our exercises. To-day she's a moving picture actress, Using her big eyes in a financially-effective way, While I write things in prose or ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... that they should all three sit together, and it appeared that such a group was within the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed them in his little bower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at five kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edison phonograph. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... come to him in his sleep, and for a few moments, so familiar were the sounds, he felt that he must have the tubes of a phonograph to his ears, and he listening to the thin, weird, wiry tones of his ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... years. Would we not expect in that time a world of inventions and discoveries, even surpassing those of the last 100 years? The Chinese claim a multitude of inventions and a race so nearly normal as ape-men, ought to have invented language, writing, printing, the telegraph, phonograph, the wireless, the radio, television, and even greater ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... was a combat in which there was no quarter, no gallery, and no reporters. The men spoke from their hearts, and if any orator could have moved an assembly by his power and genius, Mr. Redmond ought to have had a unanimous vote recorded in favour of his chief. I am not a phonograph, nor was I a journalist privileged to record what passed, and have no intention ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... legs are padded with tar and oakum, and if a dog bites a bit out of him, it will take that dog weeks to pick his teeth clean. Never bite anybody again, that dog won't. And he'll talk, talk, talk, like a suffragist gone mad; his phonograph can be charged for 100,000 words, and all you've got to do is to speak into it what you want him to say, and he'll say it. He'll go on saying it till he talks his man silly, or gets an order. He has an order-form in his hand, and as soon as anyone signs it and gives it back to ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations made by a point on a diaphragm that was ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... approve of dimples, and he says I am soft. And he has the most desperate old chum you ever saw, a perfect wreck with red whiskers, and they get together every night and play pinochle and smoke smelly old pipes, and he won't have curtains in his bedroom, and he is crazy about a phonograph, and he ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... invention, called phonograph, where the human voice is reproduced, and can go on for ever being reproduced. I sang in one through a horn, and they transposed this on a platina roll and wound it off. Then they put it on another disk, and I heard my voice—for the first time in ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... you were pretty sick of it. Full of roistering young idiots. Piano and phonograph going at once, pairs of gigglers in the pantry at the refrigerator, pairs on the stairs and on the verandah, cigar-ashes—my cigars—and cigarettes over everything, and more infernal spooning going on than I've ever ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... think a phonograph would show any record of that. The sound doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a fourth dimension sound might be supposed ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... under any pretext. Charteris' banjo was the joy of his fellows and the bane of his House-master. Being of a musical turn and owning a good deal of pocket-money, he had, at the end of the summer holidays, introduced the delights of a phonograph into the House. This being vetoed by the House-master, he had returned at the beginning of the following term with a penny whistle, which had suffered a similar fate. Upon this he had invested in a banjo, and the dazed Merevale, feeling that ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... afflicts the suffering ear in this part of the world. Fourteen months ago I heard the last American girl speak the last American-girl language that's come within reach of me. Oh, no,—there WAS one, since, but she rasped like a rheumatic phonograph and had brick-colored freckles. Have ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know what that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in lively groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... were up in the drawing-room, the library, the dining-room, and the wide hall; there sounded, presently, the tinkling music of the phonograph, and there was the unceasing movement of white-clad figures which seemed to float in ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... revolution in science and technology has been particularly noteworthy in the field of communication, extending from the family to the entire human race; from the home telephone, the morning newspaper, the phonograph, radio and television to regular mail delivery, the printing press, the camera, lithography, the typewriter, tele-communication, the computer, public address systems and the various devices for overhearing and ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... up the long aisle at the double line of workers in their creams and browns, their fingers deftly placing the blanks in position and removing the finished discs. Somewhere, unseen, a phonograph started playing ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... information ought to have astonished me more than it did, but I had read enough about the wonders of the phonograph to be prepared in a vague sort of way for almost anything which might be related of it, and for the rest, after the air-brakes, the steam heat, the electric lights and annunciators, the vestibuled ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... by a single kerosene lamp. Cigarette smoke mingled with the pungent smell of whiskey, which seemed to be the chief ingredient of a concoction in a large pail, under the lamp. In the corner opposite the pail was a phonograph over which ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... with Richard. He did not dance as well as Philip, but he gave the effect of doing it easily. He swung her finally out into the hall. The whine of the phonograph ceased. Richard and Eve sat down on a lower step ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... the world possessed an easy and convenient instrument which could be mastered in a couple of years and did not need the eternal tuning of harps and fiddles and was much pleasanter to the ears than the mediaeval tubas, clarinets, trombones and oboes. Just as the phonograph has given millions of modern people their first love of music so did the early "pianoforte" carry the knowledge of music into much wider circles. Music became part of the education of every well-bred man and woman. Princes and rich merchants maintained private orchestras. The musician ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... true, the recent marvels of the age, the telephone, phonograph, and their fast-multiplying brood find ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... carried, waving it wildly, beseechingly—and, alas, to little spectacular avail. She was also tremendously timely: she knew the latest songs, all the latest songs—when one of them was played on the phonograph she would rise to her feet and rock her shoulders back and forth and snap her fingers, and if there was no music she would accompany ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... compressed-air rock drill, the typewriter, the Westinghouse air brake, the Janney car coupler, the cable car, the trolley systems, the electric light, the search light, electric motors, the Bell telephone, the phonograph, the gas engine, and a host of other inventions and mechanical devices were invented. To satisfy the demands of trade and commerce, great works of engineering were undertaken, such as twenty years before could ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... diagram, logogram, program, epigram, kilogram, ungrammatical. Now a representative of the graphs married into the phone family, and we have graphophone. A representative of the phones married into the graph family, and we have phonograph. A representative of the grams married into the phone family, and we have gramophone. A representative of the phones married into the gram family, and we have phonogram. Of such unions children may be born. For example, from ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... speech of it; I condense. I can't remember her exact words—there were so many; but she spoke like a book. There was something exquisitely piquant in her choice of words, in her expressionless voice. I seemed to be listening to a phonograph reciting a technical work. There was a touch of the incongruous, of the mad, that appealed to me—the commonplace rolling-down landscape, the straight, white, undulating road that, from the tops of rises, one saw running for ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... screen. And not only the great story, but any story calculated to inspire and enlighten the youthful mind. The best of the world's work and art and certain of the great novels will be presented in this way. I am going to get the great men of the world to give us three-minute sermons on the phonograph. Thus I hope to make it possible for our people to hear the voices and sentiments of kings, presidents, premiers, statesmen, and prophets—the men and ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... interpolating his opinions. He is supposed to be an impersonal person, a human machine through the medium of which the story is preserved, and he has no proper place in his narrative. One no more expects or desires a speech from him than a sermon from a penny-in-the-slot phonograph which has been paid for a comic song. He may stand behind the scenes and manipulate the puppets and speak for them, but his hand must be unseen, his voice carefully disguised, and his personality imperceptible; no ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... of the nations. I observed a few sorry wastrels leaning in maudlin helplessness upon the bar as I pressed in, still cleaving to their trough—but Geordie was not among them. I was about to withdraw, when I heard a familiar voice, above the noise of a phonograph, from one of the rooms just above the bar. It ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... discovery of anesthetics, changing pain to happy dreams and making surgery a science; the spectrum analysis, that told us the secrets of the suns; the telephone, that transports speech, uniting lips and ears; the phonograph, that holds in dots and marks the echoes of our words; the marvelous machines that spin and weave, that manufacture the countless things of use, the marvelous machines, whose wheels and levers seem to think; the discoveries in chemistry, the wave theory of light, the indestructibility of matter and ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... tell you, and it's not necessary to stand on the courthouse steps at high noon and do the human phonograph act, as it's strictly under your bonnet. One evening about three years ago, before Johnny and I had moved to our new flat, I had turned in kind of early, as I had been to the Cabinet-Makers' Ball at Turner's Hall the night before, and it had been a great success. I was wakened by Johnny ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... purposeful. Is it possible to believe that the human body, with all its complicated mechanism, its many wonderful organs of secretion and excretion and assimilation, is any more matter of chance than a watch or a phonograph is? Though what agent to substitute for the word "chance," I confess I do not know. The short cut to an omnipotent Creator sitting apart from the thing created will not satisfy the naturalist. And to make energy itself creative, as Professor Osborn does, is only to ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... stood watch, the three others rolling up in their blankets among the luggage. It occurred to me for the first time that we had a phonograph under the cargo. I went down after it. At random I chose a record and set the machine going. It was a Chopin Nocturne played on a 'cello—a vocal yearning, a wailing of frustrate aspirations, a brushing of sick wings across the gates ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Yet he did not find that in the routine which satisfied his intellect. He knew himself to be a machine; not a creative machine—there is no such thing—but a reconstructive instrument. He was a meat-grinder, a fanning-mill, after that a phonograph—nothing more. Yet, from sheer physical and superficially mental activity he was, in a measure, satisfied with his lot. He derived satisfaction from a comparison of his working ability with that of other clerks. He should have compared himself ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... Washington, or at Jacob A. Riis! What daring, what indefatigable toil, what insight, patience, and swerveless hope have been put into their task! Edison is said to have spent six months hissing S into his phonograph to make it repeat that letter, and many days he worked seventeen hours a day. Have many ministers ever bent themselves in this way to solve a special moral problem—that of, say, a disobedient child in the congregation? Have they spent ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... brutal habits of male adventurers. Two negresses, from "Ole Virginny," with me, who said they would like to "see Africa again"; a few Arabs, to carry our baggage. Intend to study home-life of African tribes, and to get them to talk into my phonograph. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... at himself and went down into the crowd foregathered in ways of pleasure, and there he drank of the beer whose name was flaunted to the simple stars. Truly a message to this people must be put into a sign of electric bulbs; into a phonograph to be listened to for a coin, with an automatic banjo accompaniment; or it must be put upon the stage to be acted or sung or danced! Otherwise he would be a wheel rejected—a wheel ground up in striving to become a part ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... had registered the degree of impression that Birnier sought. So he lighted the lamp, bade the excited Mungongo to bring out the phonograph, a machine adjusted with the recording cylinders as well as the reproduction, and after a successful demonstration of magic, discussed with Marufa a certain scheme to which the old wizard, quick to see the possibilities, ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... him on the back. "That's right. I'm a regular phonograph, when you wind me up." He did not think it necessary to explain that he had talked to make the outlaws talk, and that he had noted the quality of their voices so carefully that he would know them again among a thousand. Also he had observed—other ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... light and dynamo, the sole practical use made of electricity was in the field of telegraphy. But now in rapid succession came the many forms of electric lights and electric motors; the electric railway, the search light; photography by electric light; the welding of metals by electricity; the phonograph and the telephone. In the decade between 1876 and 1886 came also the hydraulic dredger, the gas engine, the enameling of sheet-iron ware for kitchen use, the bicycle, and the passenger elevator, which has transformed city life and dotted ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... future meditation. Long after Larry had lightly forgotten all save the large facts of his illness and incarceration, Christian could describe the Pope, whose highly-coloured presentment beatified (rather than beautified) the wall over Larry's bed, and could imitate, with the accuracy of a phonograph, the voice of Mrs. Mangan, as she issued her opinions on the state of the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... "'Why, with a phonograph inside him to grind out all the stock remarks, you would not be able to tell him from a real man,' said the girl who had first suggested ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... canny Chinese proprietors smoking tiny pipes. Trains from towns along the Canal, and sometimes the black funeral-car, bound for Monkey Hill Cemetery. Gambling-houses where it is considered humorous to play "Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night?" on the phonograph while wandering boys sit at poker; and less cleanly places, named after the various states. Negro wenches in yellow calico dancing to fiddled tunes older than voodoo; Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale-green ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... with a flourish. All that Trudy had considered as really essential to the making of a home was a phonograph and a pier glass; the rest was simple—rent a furnished place and wear out someone else's things. The bandbox of a place with four cell-like rooms was by turns pitiful and amusing to ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation had been equalized. The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the typewriter, the sewing-machine, and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor. We had a steamboat or two on the Thames, we had steam warships, and the beginnings of a steam commercial marine; I was getting ready to send out an expedition ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
