Word: phonographs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that is distinctly not zoo-like. All too human, The Glass Menagerie remembers the post-adolescent longing for freedom and adventure of a young poet caged in a fading, depressionistic tenement, but more, it characterizes the last generation that could daydream innocently. That era's dream machines were the phonograph and the movie projector, but they worked songs and pictures that opened romantic vistas so different from today's defined and redefined motion-coloring-books. The surpisingly good production at South House evokes Menagerie's melancholy past but knows also our electro-mood present and cries beautifully at the future...
...last of the menagerie's precious trio is the glass animal herself, the crippled--"not crippled, you have a defect," says Amanda--Laura. Laura evokes only sympathy, smothered in abuse and pain, hopelessly shy, wandering alone in her own world of phonograph music, long winter walks and dear glass creatures. Williams is at pain to show that she most resembles her favorite glass friend, a tiny unicorn--"aren't they extinct in the modern world?" who is "crippled" by his horn but loses it in an accident, suddenly, like all the other glass horses, less freakish...
...Thomas Alva Edison was also the most prolific inventor who ever lived; without his gadgets modern life would be inconceivable. The phonograph, the movie camera, the microphone, the mimeograph, the stock ticker-they only begin the list. Though Alexander Graham Bell devised the first telephone transmitter and receiver, it was Edison who worked out a system of reproducing phone conversations over long distances loudly enough that they could be heard easily, and who may have been the first to shout "hello" into a telephone mouthpiece. His one discovery in basic science-the "Edison effect," the emission of electrons from...
...that "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." No matter that he hired assistants to do the sweating while he provided the spark; nearly all his inventions came after thousands of experiments that failed but taught him something. The only device that worked on the first try was the phonograph. It was a piece of serendipity; Edison had been trying to invent a device that would permit telephone messages to be sent over telegraph lines, and was astonished to discover that the apparatus could record his own voice. Partly because the phonograph came so easily, he distrusted it enough...
Digital recording-a process that radically improves the sound of conventional phonograph records and could eventually make them obsolete-may be the single biggest sound advance since technicians discovered that two speakers were better than one. "I won't say when it will happen," says RCA Records Division Vice President Thomas Z. Shepard, "but digital is definitely on its way." Robert Ingebretsen, vice president of a digital recording company called Soundstream, Inc., compares conventional record listening to "looking out a dirty window: you can see, but not perfectly. Listening to a digital recording is like looking out the same...