Littell's Living Age/Volume 136/Issue 1756/Baron Munchausen's Frozen Words

From The Spectator.

BARON MUNCHAUSEN'S FROZEN WORDS .

The telephone is the wonder of the day, but among the inventions to which the investigation of this subject has given rise is one of a kind which to us—accustomed as we now are to the electric telegraph—appears still more marvellous than even the telephone itself, one which would enable us to talk further into the future than the telephone will ever enable us to talk into space. Every one remembers the story of Baron Münchausen hearing the words which had been frozen during the severe cold, melting into speech again, so that all the babble of a past day came floating about his ears. Well, that extravagant piece of nonsense appears to have been realized by modern science, though not precisely by Baron Münchausen's suggested method. Professor Barrett’s interesting lectures on the telephone contained an account of the invention we refer to, which might strictly be called a telephone in the time-sense, since it will so reproduce the tone of words once spoken as to enable those who take the proper measures, to reel them off again in the very same voice as that of the speaker, months—and we may soon, perhaps, be able to say years—after the speaker himself is dead. We do not pretend to describe the talking phonograph minutely, but the principle of it is this. A vibrating metal diaphragm is so arranged as to vibrate in unison with the voice of the speaker, who must be near it, and direct his voice towards it. In connection with this metal diaphragm is a pointer, so adjusted as to dot a piece of tinfoil placed spirally on a revolving drum, with every vibration of the diaphragm. The rate at which the drum revolves must be carefully noted, for in retranslating the effect of the dots on the tinfoil into the vibration of the pointer attached to another vibrating plate, as the drum revolves past it, so as to reproduce in these new plate-vibrations the sound of the original voice, if the revolution were faster than before, the same words would be heard, but in a higher key; while if it were slower, the same words would be heard, but in a lower key. It is, then, quite possible to keep this register of a speech as long as the tin-foil will last without being injured by oxidization. And at present that seems to be only for a few months. Still it is quite conceivable even now, that five or six months after a speech had been uttered, you should hear it reeled off, as it were, from the tin-foil register, by the help of the revolving drum, and a new pointer, pressed by a gentle spring against the tinfoil, so as to enter the dotted apertures previously made in it and excite the old vibrations, as it so enters them, in a new vibrating-plate, so as to form a perfect reproduction both in voice and expression of the words in the original sentence, and indeed so as to make an ignorant person believe that the same lips were repeating what they had uttered months ago, in the very same manner and with the same cadence. In this way you may literally bottle a speech and reproduce it months hence; nor is there anything absurd in the principle in the joke of Punch's last "Comic Almanack," which suggested the bottling of various operatic performances and turning on the various taps at given signals. It is even scientifically conceivable,—we do not say it is very probable,—that after this fashion the nineteenth century may talk to the twenty-ninth, and be heard in the very words and cadences of a thousand years ago,—that a speech of Mr. Gladstone's, for example, or of Mr. Carlyle's, or of Mr. Biggar's should be thus registered on some more permanent equivalent for the tin-foil, and the rate of the revolution of the drum be carefully noted as the process takes place, so that when after a thousand years have elapsed, and when a generation of men probably far more different from ourselves than we are from the Saxons of Alfred's time are living here, this voice from the far-away past may be heard, reiterating counsels the very occasion of which is forgotten, or droning out complaints and accusations, the irrelevance of which shall then seem even greater, if that be possible, than it seems to us now. Talk of the urns of your ancestors' ashes,—the drums of their ancestors will be our posterity's most affecting mode of recalling their day. We might conceive every house furnished with such drums and vibrating plates, each stored with some speech, the speaker of which has long since been dead, and the anniversary of birth or death solemnized by the liberation of some one of such speeches from its long entombment. At the accession of each new monarch, we might have a chosen assembly called together to hear the most momentous speech from the throne ever delivered by the most remarkable of his predecessors, since the epoch when this method of preserving speech was first invented,—a Pope Leo XXI., for instance, surrounded by his cardinals, inclining his ear to the vibrating plate, from which should proceed the address uttered by Pio Nono to his last consistory, or a Hohenzollern of the twenty-first century summoning his cabinet to hear with him, for the third or fourth rehearsal, it may be, the precise words of the last assault directed against the see of Rome by the great Prince Bismarck. Nay, we may have speeches prepared expressly for posterity, as so many speeches have, in a metaphorical sense, been said to be. Lord Beaconsfield is just the man to lecture posterity on the great Asian mystery. What is to prevent him from creating a corporate body whose charter shall require them to preserve a drum and tin-foil scroll indented with his prophecy of the mode in which the Asian mystery will unfold itself,—the prophecy to be rehearsed once in every century after his death till its complete fulfilment shall have been verified? Doubtless, the prospect, is a formidable one. For, what with the many decipherers of apocalyptic riddles, and the many decipherers of scientific and metaphysical riddles, and the many decipherers of currency riddles, who are quite sure that they are right, we may well anticipate that a large part of the occupation of posterity will be either the task of reverentially listening to our very bad attempts at reading the future, or of irreverentially destroying the records intended, but not calculated, to inspire them with admiration of our foresight. Indeed the "drum ecclesiastic" alone, if when properly spiralled with tin-foil it can thus be made to yield back the ancient sounds of primeval controversy, would find quite occupation enough for the ears of posterity, to drown all the drums military of a pretty large Continental war.

But to turn from the more whimsical aspects of this very curious discovery to its more impressive aspects, certainly nothing of modern invention has proved so extraordinary an illustration of the subjective character of space-and-time distinctions as these two kinds of telephones,—the telephone which enables a man to speak at one point and be heard at another, hundreds of miles distant, and the still more curious telephone which enables a man to speak at one point of time and be heard when not only his name, but even his nation, it may be, is forgotten. Some thirty years ago or more a very curious little book was published, entitled "The Stars and the Earth," in which it was shown how, if an eye could be imagined riding on a ray of light reflected from an opening flower and passing on it through endless space and time, such an eye would always see that flower as it was in the same momentary phase of opening in which it appeared at the time that ray was first reflected from it, and would so see it to all eternity, whereas if it travelled the least bit faster, so as to overtake—say, in a thousand years—the ray which left the flower a minute sooner, that eye would be reading backwards the change which we see accomplished in a minute, but would have it spread and subdivided over the period of a thousand years. In the same way, if an eye could be imagined travelling in the direction of the same ray of light, but rather slower, so as to fall behind it by a minute in a thousand years, then it would see the next minute, instead of the previous minute, of that opening blossom's history, stretched out to the length of a thousand years. All this was intended to illustrate the extremely subjective character of the nature of time, and to prove that it only requires us to imagine a different relation between our eye and the light reflected from any object, to make a thousand years appear as one day and one day as a thousand years. For of course, if the retina in question were conceived as travelling from the earth so rapidly that in a minute's time it could overtake the ray which left the earth a thousand years ago, then for that one point of space, such a retina would travel in a minute over the history of a thousand years. Well, that was but an imaginative illustration of the subjective character of the meaning of time. But here is a real illustration of it which we may all witness. It may happen even in the lifetime of living men that real conversations will be carried on between the most distant points which beings with earthly bodies can manage to reach; and it may happen, too, also in the lifetime of living men, that the perfect semblance of the voice of one who died during a man's infancy may vibrate in his ear, and repeat his own very words, in his young contemporary's old age. The future, indeed, may hear more wonderful things still. It may hear the voices of every century from and after the nineteenth, though of none before it, reproduced ages hence. The problems which we discuss so hotly as to the mode in which the Greeks and Romans spoke their language may have no existence in relation to the pronunciation of words in any age later than this, for the actual sound of every existing provincial dialect may be reproduced literally, and this for ears to which not only such dialects, but the most classical forms of the most classical languages of our day, will have become quite obsolete. The thirtieth century may hear the orations of a Welsh Eisteddfod and the broad clamor of a Yorkshire horse-fair, in the very accents of our own time. Surely, nothing could be more impressive as a lesson on the undue importance which we attach to time. "We have heard with our ears, and our fathers have told us," may in future apply not merely to the fathers we have seen, but to the forefathers we have never seen. The distinction between dead and living languages, indeed, may thus be in great measure obliterated. The ancient world,—ancient, that is, to our posterity—may be—to the ear, at least, and to the eye also, so far as photography can make it so,—present and living still. Men may live, as it were, in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-ninth at the same time, belonging indeed to the twenty-ninth, but hearing auricular confessions communicated straight from the nineteenth. Will a man so situated have any notion like that which we attach to the irrecoverable "past"? Will he not live in a sort of focus of all spaces and all times, hardly distinguishing, as we do, ancient from modern, and hardly even the near from the distant? Whatever he may lose by that rather bewildering position, he will certainly gain a clearer view of the highly subjective character of time and space, and its almost purely personal significance,—a significance, that is, requiring entirely separate interpretation, in reference to the particular conditions of particular organizations.