Word: booth
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Actual voice records of Edwin F. Booth, the foremost American actor of the last century and said to be the greatest Hamlet of all time, have been salvaged for posterity largely through the work of Frederick C. Packard '20, assistant professor of Public Speaking...
George Middleton, author of "The Unknown Lady," first informed Mr. Packard of the existence of a collection of voice records of actors of the last century. The trail finally led to the Players' Club, a society of actors in New York, where Booth had delivered the speeches for recording in April...
Through this organization Mr. Packard was able to contact Edwin Booth Grossman, grandson of the actor. Mr. Grossman had two wax cylinder records, one of Othello's speech to the Venetian senators concerning the wooing of Desdemona, and the other of Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be." Both records take exactly four and a half minutes to play. They were, however, very faint and obscured by much extra noise to such an extent that Mr. Grossman, despaired of ever having them transferred to modern phonograph discs...
...Booth's apparatus and methods were intricate. He had to devise a special stopcock-sealing grease that boron trifluoride would not attack, a system of magnetically controlled rods for stirring his mixtures in closed vessels. Every time he generated the trifluoride he washed the maze of tubes, flasks and stills 20 times with air which had been freed of carbon dioxide. Argon 99.9+% was repeatedly distilled for further purification and the boron trifluoride was cleaned until it showed pure in the spectroscope...
...last week, Dr. Booth croaked jubilantly: "While we were led to the discovery of the argon-fluoride compounds for scientific reasons, we are studying certain possible applications but are not yet ready to discuss them...