A letter to an old friend, by Edmund Thorley
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this letter, written in 1890, a retired schoolmaster describes to an old friend a public demonstration of the phonograph, a new machine that could record sound on wax cylinders and play it back.
My dear Hallam, You will remember that when we last met I called the phonograph a parlour toy for people with more money than sense, and you called me an old fossil. I went to the demonstration at the Assembly Rooms on Tuesday intending to prove myself right, and I am obliged to report that the matter is not so simple.
The showman, a young American with a striped waistcoat and teeth that would have done credit to a horse, spent a full quarter of an hour telling us that we were about to witness ‘the Eighth Wonder of the World’. I have seen eight wonders of the world announced in that room since 1870, including a pig that could tell the time. The machine itself is a small brass affair with a wax cylinder and a horn like a giant convolvulus flower, and it sat upon its table looking a good deal more modest than its master.
He began with a cornet solo recorded, he said, in New York. I will be honest with you. It sounded like a wasp trapped in a biscuit tin, a long way off, on a windy day. There was a deal of hissing and crackling, and the tune, when I could find it, was one I never wish to hear again. Mrs Purefoy beside me declared it heavenly. Mrs Purefoy declares most things heavenly.
Then he asked for a gentleman to speak into the horn, and before I knew what I was about I had put up my hand, I suppose so as to have the pleasure of exposing the trick. I recited the first lines of the Latin grammar, as I recited them to forty years of small boys. He turned a handle, changed something, and the machine spoke them back to me.
Hallam, it was my voice. Thinner, and with a crackle in it, but my own voice, with the very little catch I have on the word ‘mensa’, which I had never heard from the outside in my life. The room laughed and applauded. I did not laugh. I found that I had sat down rather suddenly.
I have been thinking about it ever since. If a voice can be kept in wax, then a man’s voice might outlast the man. I thought of my father, whose voice I can no longer quite remember, and I own that I should give a good deal for one of those little cylinders with him upon it. I do not say the machine is beautiful. I say it is more than a toy. Do not, I beg you, call me a fossil again until you have heard it.
Ever your friend, Edmund Thorley
“The writer remains unimpressed by the new invention.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.