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Phonograph   Listen
noun
Phonograph  n.  
1.
A character or symbol used to represent a sound, esp. one used in phonography. (archaic)
2.
(Physics) An instrument for the mechanical registration and reproduction of audible sounds, as articulate speech, etc. An early simple version consisted of a rotating cylinder or disk covered with some material easily indented, as tinfoil, wax, paraffin, etc., above which is a thin plate carrying a stylus. As the plate vibrates under the influence of a sound, the stylus makes minute indentations or undulations in the soft material, and these, when the cylinder or disk is again turned, set the plate in vibration, and reproduce the sound. Modern versions use electronic circuitry and various more stable recording media to record sound more accurately.
3.
An instrument for reproducing sounds, especially music, previously recorded on a plastic cylinder or disk as a pattern of bumps or wiggles in a groove. A needle (stylus) held in the groove is made to vibrate by motion (rotation) of the recording, and the vibrations caused by the bumps and wiggles are transmitted directly to a membrane, or first transduced into electrical impulses and sent to an electronic amplifier circuit, thereby reproducing with greater or less fidelity the original sounds. A phonograph which is equipped with electronics enabling the playback of sound with high fidelity to the original is often called a hi-fi. Note: In the 1990's such devices are beginning to be replaced in many homes by compact disk players; the production of plastic recordings of music for playback on a phonograph has almost ceased for entertainment purposes.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Phonograph" Quotes from Famous Books



... that she only understood vaguely. She did seem to wish to understand it. But the others listened greedily, as well they might, for the conversation on the stage was like the conversation in the Grosvenor Street drawing-room, as like as if a phonograph was ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... other form would be as fit; but the forms of living things are always 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 substitute one god for ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... life-preserver. Henry Clay drew a Henry Clay from his pocket and began to smoke vigorously. Hannibal said he would turn cannibal if the boat went down again. Cleopatra said she would die happy if only they would start up the phonograph, and Homer did so, with that beautiful ode entitled, 'Why Eat Turkey When Corned Beef Is ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer

... his wife. In 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 ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... buzzing of a fly which an intoxicated man is catching on a window-pane, and the sounds of a saw; drolly performed, standing with his face in the corner, the conversation of a nervous lady over the telephone; imitated the singing of a phonograph record, and in the end, with exceeding likeness to life, showed a little Persian lad with a little trained monkey. Holding on with his hand to an imaginary small chain and at the same time baring his teeth, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... the wonder of the town over a phonograph which Mr. Leicester brought with him? In fact, the last of the summer seemed altogether the pleasantest, and papa and Betty had a rare holiday together. Aunt Mary and Aunt Barbara, Serena and Letty, and Seth and Jonathan were all in a whirl from ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett

... relief or engraving of the picture is obtained on the gelatine, and a cross section through the plate would, if looked at edgeways, appear serrated, or up and down, like a section of country or the trace of the stylus in the record of a phonograph. The gelatine plate thus carved by the action of light and water is wrapped round a revolving drum or barrel, and a spring stylus or point is caused to pass over it as the barrel revolves, after the manner of a phonographic cylinder. In doing so the stylus rises and falls over the projections ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... 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 dreamt. Can only let you have them for to-night. To-morrow they go down to Yorkshire, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various

... Italian fruit store near The Greenbush bore the proprietor's name, Luigi Poggi; as he drove past he saw an old Italian woman bargaining with smiles and lively gestures over the open counter. Farther on, from an improvised wooden booth, the raucous voice of the phonograph was jarring the night air and entertaining a motley group gathered in front of it. Across the street a flaunting poster announced "Moving Picture Show for a Nickel." Vehicles of all descriptions, from a Maine "jigger" to a "top buggy," were stationary along the village thoroughfare, their ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... I was absent from the house that night, on some business of the Brotherhood, and the next morning I breakfasted in another part of the city, at a restaurant. I had scarcely begun my meal when a phonograph, which, in a loud voice, was proclaiming the news of the day before for the entertainment of ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... Anyone possessing 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 enough to allow crossing it, thus ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... in a whisper, so lost on Larry, who had just turned to speak with the phonograph exhibitor ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... insurance companies, and one or two china plaques in plush frames. A bead portiere hung between the two parlours, constantly clicking and catching as the guests swarmed to and fro. All the chairs in the house had been set about the walls, and all were occupied. A disk on the phonograph was duly revolving, in charge of a hysterical girl in blue silk and a flushed, humorous young man, but the music ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... man, taken somewhat aback. "I beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... his arms and whirl her into the land of romance to the rhythm of the waltz. He wanted to shout it out to the chipmunks and the quails. Ever and again he broke out with a line or two of a melody he had heard once from a phonograph. No matter if he did not get the words exactly. He was sure of the sentiment. So the hills ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... mechanical things. When the phonograph was first put on the market he had one in his office at 1127 Broadway. Once in London he found a mechanical tiger that growled, walked, and even clawed. He enjoyed watching it ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... invented in 1877. The expression of 77 is found in {C}o{g}nate, and that indicates the resemblance of the human mechanism to receive sounds to the Phonograph; for both processes utilize vibrations, and are therefore from similarity of functions "Cognate" methods. How any one could forget analytic date-words is more than I can understand, ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)

... 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 ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse

... if I do say it, it was a LETTER. I commenced it "Darling," and I said I was mad to see him, and that I would always love him. But I told him that the Familey objected to him, and that this was to end everything between us. They had started the phonograph in the library, and were playing "The Rosary." So I ended with a verse from that. It was really a most affecting letter. I almost wept over it myself, because, if there had been a Harold, it would have broken ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... 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

... 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 ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... distracting it is stimulating. It's all a part of the mechanism of the shop, helping him along unconsciously to speed and efficiency. I've often thought that, when I was handling a good, bloody murder story, say, it would tone up my style to have a phonograph about ten feet away grinding out The Last Ravings of John McCullough. Anyway, I am sure it wouldn't do any harm. A brass band playing a John Philip Sousa march makes fine accompaniment to write copy to. I've done it before now, covering parades and ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... 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

... Mr. Rossi called it. 'We must save up for an instrument to reproduce it, Sister,' he said. But, look you, the very next day the carriers brought the phonograph." ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... Certain kinds of works, for example, musical, dramatic, and literary works, may be fixed not in "copies" but by means of sound in an audio recording. Since audio recordings such as audio tapes and phonograph disks are "phonorecords" and not "copies", the "C in a circle" notice is not used to indicate protection of the underlying musical, dramatic, or literary ...
— Supplementary Copyright Statutes • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.

... each of the rooms in your corridor, ready to leap forth when called, lie the sounds or voices I have captured and imprisoned, these separate chambers being sheeted and prepared—huge wax receptacles, in fact, akin to the cylinders of the phonograph. Together with the form or pattern belonging to them, and the color, there they lie at present in silence and invisibility, just as the universe lay in silence and invisibility before the word of God called it into objective being. ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... parlor, waiting for him. The one electric lamp was lighted, so that the phonograph in one corner became only a bit of reflected light. There was a gas fire going, and in front of it was a white fur rug. In Aunt Harriet's circle there were few orientals. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, not ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... circumstances is it expected that this lady will play anything that you can understand or that I could understand. It would be contrary to the ethics of her calling and deeply repugnant to her artistic temperament to play a tune that would sound well on a phonograph record. This would never do. She comes forward, stripped for battle, and bows and peels off her gloves and fiddles with the piano-stool until she gets it adjusted to suit her, and then she sits down, prepared to render an immortal work composed by one of the old ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... where you are," remarked George. "What do you take me for, a phonograph with a blank record? Forget about those silly wings that were going to make a swimmer out of you. A few more duckings like this at the end of a rope and you'll be ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel

... 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 be translated ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... 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 marriage ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... devouring flames of glory, for never again doth it return to earth, . . and none can solve the mystery of its vanishing! 'Tis a graceful piece of jugglery and perfectly accomplished, . . while as for Oracles [Footnote: The Phonograph was known and used for the utterance of Oracles by one Savan the Asmounian, a Priest-King of ancient Egypt.] that command and repeat their commands in every shade of tone, from mild to wrathful, there are ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... the 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 bananas; memories of the Spanish Main and Morgan's ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... 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, that the secretary could not use shorthand and that there was no telephone whatever in ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... 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 my life. If that ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone

... thing about an evening like this is, it don't seem to last any time at all. Why, when those girls began to put up their hands to hide their yawns, I felt like I was just starting in for a short call. I wish I could have had a good phonograph around. I'd put it on my sleepless pillow, and unwind its precious record all through the watches of the night." He imitated the thin phantasmal squeak of the instrument in repeating a number of Miss Swan's characteristic phrases. "Yes, ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... spanned, and that by a simple mechanical arrangement, which a man can carry in his hand, it would be possible to reproduce the words, voice, and accent of the dead. The photograph, the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph were all more or less latent in what seemed to our ancestors the kite-flying folly of Benjamin Franklin. Who knows but that in Telepathy we may have the faint foreshadowing of another latent force, which may yet be destined to cast ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead

... 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 ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... 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 ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... once the animals indulged in queer antics. One lay upside down, his feet flailing the air; another stood on his head in space; two does on my left whirled round and round as though dancing with a phonograph record for a floor. The next instant I joined their troupe. In the flash that followed I remembered seeing the tops of small trees beneath me, remembered my skis whipping across in ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills

... they please with their neighbors at a very small yearly charge. They also keep track of the grain and stock markets by telephone, have their daily metropolitan paper, a county paper, monthly magazines (of which they are the best readers), perhaps a piano or an organ, more likely, now, a phonograph, which reproduces, if they choose, what is heard in Paris or in concerts or the grand opera; reproductions of pieces of statuary or paintings in the Louvre; and either a fast driving horse or an automobile. They are often within easy reach of a ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... whir and a click of a mechanism. Fifteen feet away, Mark watched as the arm of a phonograph rose, moved slowly back to the starting point. Then the record began once more to grind ...
— Operation Lorelie • William P. Salton

... key to the principle underlying the gramophone, the phonograph and the telephone, if it be not in this self-same atomic and easily ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... remained. So she rose, with a 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 word ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers

... breath of satisfaction. Here, at last, was something 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 loveliness ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... you're too modest. If you could hear the things I hear—" He paused, 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 a course of ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... 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

... very often leads to another, and the telephone already has an offspring not less wonderful than itself. It is called the speaking-phonograph. It was invented by Mr. Edison, one ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... 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

... 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

... Floresville, who falls in fine with the idea. They give a banquet in 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

... those strange noises that people seem to so much enjoy—else why do they remain within reach of them instead of running far away, as did Baldy at first? But he, like the rest of the Allan and Darling family, had eventually become used to the phonograph; and their perfect self-control now enabled them to lie quietly through the "Sextette from Lucia" or the latest rag time at least with ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling

... 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 ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... out a hollow place in his back and put a phonograph inside, and when I wound it up ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope

... 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 ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... talking to you now has been director of a circus in America; I've travelled through all the countries and sailed over every sea in the world; at present I'm adrift in a violent tempest; at night I go from cafe to cafe with this phonograph, and the next morning I carry around one of these betting apparatuses that consists of an Infiel[1] Tower with a spiral. Underneath the tower there's a space with a spring that shoots a little bone ball up the spiral, and then the bone falls upon a board perforated with holes and painted ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... 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 ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay

... he could not do? He mimicked birds and animals; he imitated a wheezy phonograph playing "When We Were a Couple of Kids"; he recited "The Raven" and "Paul Revere's Ride"; he gave a cutting from Dickens and one from Sheridan Knowles; he showed how Joe Jefferson played Rip Van Winkle, how Sol Smith Russell did "A ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... be likened to a phonograph into which we can speak while the cylinder of thought revolves; at any time afterward every syllable may be ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... at. Its long, low, flat roof and rough, unwhitewashed, mud-colored walls give it an unattractive appearance; yet to one's intense surprise the inside may be clean and comfortable, with modern furniture, a piano, and a phonograph. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham

... each other a little, for this is a love scene going on. On a white framed space in the back wall, stage directions are written moviely. This one spells out "Arthur is still speaking. He crosses his legs and takes an asthma cigarette." Then the gilt-lettered phonograph croaks:— ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker

... on our feet for hours, smiled yards of smiles, and said the same things over and over again so many times, that I began to feel like a phonograph doll which I saw in my first New York shop. Only, when I ran down nobody wound me up, and I had to go on by myself as best I could, which was fatiguing, and made ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... towards me. I can tell you I was mighty surprised, for not only was Captain Malet-Marsac a lone bachelor and a misogynist of blameless life, but the lady looked as though she had stepped straight out of an Early Victorian phonograph-album. She had on a crinoline sort of dress, a deep lace collar, spring-sidey sort of boots, mittens, and a huge cameo brooch. Also she had long ringlets. Her face is stamped on my memory and I could pick her out from a hundred women similarly dressed, ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... and lighted by two unusually large windows. The dimensions of the room were ample enough to accommodate a fair number of dancers. Bud knew that if cowboys loved anything they loved to dance. The phonograph was so common that it offered no distinction in gracing Bud's camp; so with much labor and expense he had freighted an upright piano from the distant railroad, an innovation that at first had stunned and then literally taken the natives off their feet. ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert

... been passed in the heart of danger, ever-impending, from the blacks. In the plantation house at Meringe, always the several white men had looked askance at the many blacks who toiled for them and belonged to them. In the living-room, where were the eating-table, the billiard-table, and the phonograph, stood stands of rifles, and in each bedroom, beside each bed, ready to hand, had been revolvers and rifles. As well, Mister Haggin and Derby and Bob had always carried revolvers in their belts when they left the house to go ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... can express the love I have for Milsand, increasingly precious as he is." The Benzons were at that time in the hills above Loch Tummel, where Jowett was staying, Swinburne also with the Master of Balliol. Had there been a phonograph to register the conversation of such a trio as Jowett, Browning, and Swinburne, its records would be ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... 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 ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... 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 to the refined conceptions of the time), no ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... Kansas named Donald Thompson. I met him first while paying a flying visit to Ostend. He blew into the Consulate there wearing an American army shirt, a pair of British officer's riding-breeches, French puttees and a Highlander's forage-cap, and carrying a camera the size of a parlour-phonograph. No one but an American could have accomplished what he had, and no American but one from Kansas. He had not only seen war, all military prohibitions to the contrary, but he had ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell

... is to undergo some marvellous changes these next few years—mechanically, politically, socially, and morally; the telephone, the phonograph, the microphone, the telemachole and coming improvements will transform our modes of labour and learning beyond our present conception. God times inventions and improvements to ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild

... fell away. The beaters squatted themselves in their semicircle again. Fireworks began to go off. Dancers assembled. Rockets hissed through the air. Roman candles popped. From the open door of his cabin came the sound of a phonograph. It was aimed directly at him, the one thing intended for his understanding alone. It was playing "When Johnny ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood

... a phonograph," affirmed the Irishman. "It's good ter hear that he'll be left anyhow for comp'ny ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund

... a living phonograph, infinitely more marvelous than that of Edison. No sound, however feeble, however slight, can escape being recorded in its wonderful mechanism. Although the molecules of this living machine may all be entirely changed many times during a lifetime, yet these ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... 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

... The Greeks have handed down to us many words about government, including the word itself, which in the beginning meant "to steer." Politics meant having to do with a polis or city. Several of the words most recently made up of Greek words are telegraph, telephone, phonograph, ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton

... bundle stupidly, then sprang up with an oath on his lips. Jim, I can see it all again as if it had taken place ten minutes ago. I can hear him word for word as if my mind had become for the time being a recording phonograph. ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... 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

... 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 ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump

... 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 ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller

... hardest things about being an inventor is that the machines (excepting the poorer ones) never show off. The first time that the phonograph (whose talking had been rumored of many months) was allowed to talk in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, New Jersey, and, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, everybody laughed. Instead of being impressed with the real idea of the phonograph—being impressed because it could talk at ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee

... been eighteen inches long, every grape great and perfect. I remember you said that such grapes looked immortal. It was impossible to believe they could ever rot—there was a kind of joyous frostiness—we went in and asked a little man what kind of grapes they were, and he answered like a phonograph, without looking or showing politeness: 'Black Hamburgs and White Muscats of Alexandria'—your old Sienkiewicz never said anything as beautiful as ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... had 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 ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn

... you please tell it into a phonograph, so I can grind it out to my grandfather when I ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer

... phonograph records and the chapter on Music, I am indebted to Mr. Albert Gale. His painstaking analysis establishes beyond question the value of the phonograph as ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... occasion as a party, it was a very quiet Marjorie who tripped into the living-room that afternoon. The big, cosy apartment had undergone a marked change. It was practically bare, save for the piano in one corner, which had been moved from the drawing-room, and a phonograph which was to do occasional duty, so that the patient musicians might now and then ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... excedingly replaced with exceedingly | | Page 122: neigbourhood replaced with neighbourhood | | Page 165: Abbaye Theleme replaced with Abbaye Theleme | | Page 259: Epehy replaced with Epehy | | Page 276: connter replaced with counter | | | | Page 63: Note that a Graphophone was a version of the | | phonograph, invented by Chichester Bell and | | Charles S. Tainter. | ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)

... in the distance came the roar and rattle of an elevated train; from a neighbouring tenement came the strains of a wheezy phonograph. The figures were at the rear door of the tenement now. A minute passed; the door opened, closed, the two figures had disappeared—and then, in a flash, Jimmie Dale had straightened up, and a steel jimmy was working with deft, silent speed at the window sash. He had the time it would take Hunchback ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... he snarled out, "every cheap skate of a university professor who never did anything himself but paddle other men's canoes, for which every human phonograph and intellectual parrot sends out thanks from his two-by-four soul! But among men who are men, among physicians who have cause to know his worth, among scientists big enough to get out of their own shadows, and, thank God, among the ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell

... sending or receiving messages. He was inquisitive—wanted to know more of the mysteries of the electricity that carried his messages. He began experimenting, and by close application to his studies, has astonished the world with his telephone, phonograph ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various

... 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 ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman

... moving picture shows were once, perhaps, places where nice persons didn't go. But it's different now. All that has been changed. Why, look at Sarah Bernhardt, doing her famous plays before the camera? Even Andrew Carnegie consented to give one of his speeches in front of the camera, with a phonograph attachment, the other day." ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope

... the street a phonograph started blaring out a jazz piece. Then it stopped as suddenly as the shouts of the children. A lot they cared, he thought. All his father's death meant to them was the irritation of ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson

... it isn't time yet to feed him—that's why. What's burning out there? I'll bet you've got the stove all over dough again—" The chair resumed its squeaking, the baby continued uninterrupted its wah-h-hah! wah-h-hah, as though it was a phonograph that had been wound up with that record on, and no one around ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... Trollope's literary ancestry, that the predominant quality of these very clever but eminently commonplace stories, with their interminable flirtations and their amusing dialogues which might have been reported by phonograph, is essentially feminine. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... have 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

... mammaryglands, also saved the country. Even Lil Abner and Snuffy Smith battled the vegetation while no one but Jiggs remained absolutely impervious. The Greengrass Blues was heard on every radio and came from every adolescent's phonograph until it was succeeded by Itty Bitty Seed ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... be a phonograph in each room, which should work all night and all day. This machine should repeat over and over a few short sentences like ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness

... properties, if they are in the undulation, are not there alone. The undulation is the work of two collaborators: it expresses both the nature of the object which provokes it and that of the nervous apparatus which is its vehicle. It is like the furrow traced in the wax of the phonograph which expresses the collaboration of an aerial vibration with a stylus, a cylinder, and a clock-work movement. This engraved line resembles, in short, neither the phonographic apparatus nor the aerial vibration, although it results from ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... accompanied with ample illustrations. We can heartily 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 ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... confused. A cause may act by impelling, releasing, or unwinding. The billiard-ball, that strikes another, determines its movement by impelling. The spark that explodes the powder acts by releasing. The gradual relaxing of the spring, that makes the phonograph turn, unwinds the melody inscribed on the cylinder: if the melody which is played be the effect, and the relaxing of the spring the cause, we must say that the cause acts by unwinding. What distinguishes ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... phonograph somewhere, in some adjacent den, there floated a tenor aria, the Bella figlia del amore, pierced suddenly and beautifully ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... 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 back ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins

... matter what kind of music or quality of performance it offers you, you presently long for something a little better—unless your development has been arrested. It makes small difference in this respect which one of the three main varieties of instrument you happen to own. It may be the phonograph. It may be the kind of automatic piano which accurately reproduces the performances of the master pianists. It may be the piano-player which indulgently supplies you with technic ready-made, and allows you to throw your own soul into the music, whether you have ever taken lessons or not. Or ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... the kind I mean, "$900 and up. Bus to hotel on fifth morning out included." I had looked forward to this here expedition for thirty years, like a guy looks forward to eight o'clock the night he's gonna call on his first girl. We had learned French and Eytalian off of a phonograph record and from givin' them spaghetti dives a play. Also, I had collected a trousseau that would of made John Drew take arsenic if he'd ever of flashed me when I was dolled up for ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer

... Becomes Chief of the tribe. Stops cannibal practices. His great influence over the people. The Pioneer arrives. Ephraim Wilmar, the hunchback. His surprise at the many changes during fifty years. His amazement at the telephone, the cable lines, the phonograph. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... 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 miles and miles, straight, straight, and so white. Filtering ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... know what a comfort my phonograph has been to me—I would never attempt another divorce without one. The long, lonely evenings—the endless days, when time never moves off the spot, my dogs and I have sat on the floor fascinated with the greatest music in the world. I like my machine because it may be depended upon, never ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr

... as it were, sees what substances are underground, and at what distances. It also shows how many people are in an adjoining room—through the magnetic properties of the iron in their blood—whether they are moving, and in what directions and at what speed they go. In connection with the phonograph and concealed by draperies, it is useful to detectives, who, through a registering attachment, can obtain a record of everything said and done. "Our political system remains with but little change. Each State has still two United ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... new section of the town, too, where the architecture runs to bungalow styles, where the installment collectors from the phonograph houses are regularly seen, and where papa gets out in front and twirls the crank when the family car goes out for its airing. No important line of demarcation separates the old staid section of town from the new and brighter one. Major Trimble, President ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... 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' de police." ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope

... which alone is enough to entangle some men. So, Jess had been set to work at political economy, finance, at studying up the political situations; and, if started right and not interfered with, she could give as good account of her teaching as any phonograph. ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... The invention of the phonograph by Edison in 1878 marked a new era in the popularity and dissemination of music. Up to that time, household music was limited to those who were rich enough to possess a real musical instrument, and ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... Canadian art than had ever been done before. In conversation at a friend's house with a stranger he claimed that at college he was always a "lazy dog." Visited once by an agent who tried to sell him a phonograph, he consented to play the flute for a record; after listening to the record and being assured that it was a faithful replica of his own performance and asked if now he would not buy the machine, he answered gravely, "No, I think I will sell the flute." This story may be apocryphal, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... good weather was great! Were we glad to have it?—oh, boy! We had just got things shipshape again when we had another blow, but this second one was by no means as bad as the first. And after that we had another spell of decent weather. The crew used to start the phonograph and keep it ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... condemned to death "all persons invoking any evil spirits, or consulting, covenanting with, entertaining, employing, feeding, or rewarding any evil spirit", or generally practising any "infernal arts". This was not repealed until the eighteenth century was far advanced. Edison's phonograph would 280 years ago have insured martyrdom for its inventor; the utilisation of electric force to transmit messages around the world would have been clearly the practice of an infernal art. At least we may plead that unbelief ...
— Humanity's Gain from Unbelief - Reprinted from the "North American Review" of March, 1889 • Charles Bradlaugh

... so 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 ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess

... of the blind forces of Nature, its votaries were first decisively termed magicians—a corruption of the word "Magh," signifying a wise or learned man. Sceptics of a century ago would have been as wide of the mark if they had laughed at the idea of a phonograph or telegraph. The ridiculed and the "infidels" of one generation generally become the wise men and saints ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... acquire the real accent of the native is to listen repeatedly to the language spoken by a native. With our phonograph No. 0034 and a selection of suitable records the student may listen for as many hours daily as he chooses to the voice of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various

... in the days following the opening of the summer season at Gates Harbor, was considerably mystified by the actions of the family phonograph. Now while a talking machine is admittedly endowed with one human attribute, it is supposed to be a talking and not a walking machine. Yet unless it were endowed with motive power, how explain the sudden oddities of its ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... 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 Bobbsey Twins in the Country • Laura Lee Hope

... clocks and watches; how he became interested in the telegraph, the telephone, steam cars, steamboats, electric light and steam heat, and how he had them first brought into the palace and then established throughout the empire: and how he had the phonograph, graphophone, cinematograph, bicycle, and indeed all the useful and unique inventions of modern times brought in ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... enterprise by producing the first newspaper printed in a railway train; turning his attention to telegraphy, he revolutionised the whole system by a series of inventions, to which he has since added others, to the number of 500, the most notable being the megaphone, phonograph, kinetoscope, a carbon telegraph transmitter, and improvements in electric ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... ten feet 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 a voice spoke: ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben

... of the other door is soon answered by a shrill, cracked voice like the sputtering of a cheap phonograph, and opening the flimsy door I find myself in a tiny topsy-turvy chamber, with all its furniture dragged out of place, a pail of water in the centre of the floor, a piece of scrubbing-soap on the table, and an unwrung house-flannel soaking on the seat of a wooden chair. There is ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... ragtime so disturbs them that they give but little milk. The newspapers claim that Charles W. Ward, who owns a ranch near Eureka, California, says that the right kind of music will increase the production of milk, and that he uses a phonograph in ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon

... dexterity. But when people are in Nubia they are supposed to do as the Nubians do and not regard these little negligences. Some of the women went out, but Johnny and Louis stayed in; and they kept staying like a small boy at a free phonograph. They were ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')

... signs and additional letters have been employed for this purpose, the use of which is open to objections. There is need of some accurate method by which observations can be recorded. The difficulties besetting the path of the linguist can be in a measure obviated by the employment of the phonograph, by the aid of which the languages of our aborigines can be permanently perpetuated. As a means of preserving the songs and tales of races which are fast becoming extinct, it is, I believe, destined to play an important ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes

... said Abey, screwing the guard tightly on his pin. "I'll take him on. After he's seen the Flatiron and the head waiter at the Hotel Astor and heard the phonograph play 'Under the Old Apple Tree' it'll be half past ten, and Mr. Texas will be ready to roll up in his blanket. I've got a supper engagement at 11:30, but he'll be all to the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... preachin',' I continued, 'you see all you have to do is to raise up the coat-tails and insert a record on the phonograph concealed here in the back of the chest, with a speakin' tube runnin' up to the mouth. John Henry bein' a regular minister, he can get the Homiletic Review at a dollar and a half a year; we can subscribe for that, get the up-to-datest sermons by the most distinguished divines, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various

... Writing to Taylor, he said, "I am fairly harnessed now, and at work, and, although the pulling is somewhat hard, I know my way. It is wonderful how soon a man falls into the cant of his position and learns to dole out the cut-and-dried phrases of ministerial talk like a sort of spiritual phonograph. I must confess, though, that I am rather good friends with the children who come to my Sunday-school. My own experiences as a child are so fresh in my memory that I rather sympathise with the ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... Riggs wanted to do, at the third large tea given by Mrs. Gilson for Miss Claire Boltwood, was to sneak out on the sun-porch and play over the new records on the phonograph; but the things he had heard from Mrs. Riggs the last time he'd done that had convinced him that it was not a wise method of escape. So he stood by the fireplace—safe on one side at least—and ate lettuce sandwiches, ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... discovery, has been less than that of France, less than that of Great Britain, and less than that of the United States. The Germans contributed little or nothing to the development of the railroad, the steamboat, the automobile, the aeroplane, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the photograph, the moving picture, the electric light, the sewing machine, and the reaper and binder. Even those dread instruments of war, the revolver and the machine gun, the turreted ship, the torpedo, and the submarine, are not due to the military ardor of the Germans. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... be true, the recent marvels of the age, the telephone, phonograph, and their fast-multiplying brood find a satisfactory and ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... after long ages, men evolved in sound the names of the things they knew and the forms of speech; ages later, the alphabet and the art of writing; ages later still, those wonderful instruments of extension for the written and spoken word: the telegraph, the telephone, the modern printing press, the phonograph, the ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... topic goes into 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 ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells



Words linked to "Phonograph" :   radio-phonograph, phonograph record, audio system, acoustic gramophone, record player, phonograph recording disk, pickup, phonograph album, phonograph recording, machine, pickup arm, nickelodeon, auto-changer, phonograph needle, turntable



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