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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



... her lips and shut one eye in a mighty mental effort to imagine what he would say, but in trying to hear his words she could only see his glowing face, the rumpled hair she loved so well, and then her voice came back like a perfect phonograph record, that strong, mellow, big voice which had always set her heart tingling and drove away every fear. She couldn't make him say anything else but the old sweet words that had lived with her ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung

... is anything the matter with their voice organs, but simply 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

... always interested in 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 ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... in sight Mike fired two shots as a signal for us to come to him, but I was there almost before the echoes died away in the mountains. When I rode up Mike was most beside himself with glee; his tongue ran like a phonograph, and within five minutes he had given me the history of the whole transaction and had invoked a curse on the whole Apache tribe from all the saints in ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan

... 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 who in addition had the understanding and the skill to use the instrument. ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... men except from themselves. A good manager needs no detectives, and the fellow who can't read human nature can't manage it. The phonograph records of a fellow's character are lined in his face, and a man's days tell the ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... 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 ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... don't know, 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

... to come out on Sundays to see their parents, but they usually came to supper. The family as a whole were very devoted. Mr. Chichester Bell, you may recall, was the co-inventor with my father and Mr. Tainter of the phonograph. The wax records that are used today are their invention and their company, the Columbia Phonograph Company, operated under ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... 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 of what was due their ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

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

... 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 ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... repeated efforts to make the phonograph reproduce the aspirated sound, and added: "From eighteen to twenty hours a day for the last seven months I have worked on this single word 'specia.' I said into the phonograph, 'specia, specia, specia,' but the instrument responded, 'pecia, pecia, pecia.' It was enough to drive one mad! But ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody

... people with a 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. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay

... hell that broke up, it was something inside me. I felt it smash. For a moment I didn't grasp what Taylor was saying. It sounded so like the ravings of an insane phonograph that I was for being amused, but when I found that he was actually advising the mayor to refuse our committee the use of the hay market for a bivouac during the Confederate reunion, I just got up and took his speech and fed it to him raw. I saw red with a touch of purple and I didn't know I ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... number of people in a particular community want to read and are willing to pay for. A newspaper is simply a mirror in which the community sees itself, not as it should be, but as it actually is. It is not the mother, but the daughter of public opinion. The printing press is a mighty phonograph that echoes back the joy and the sorrow, the glory and the shame of the generation it serves. I have no more quarrel with editors for filling their columns with inanities than casting shadows when they ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... being 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 ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... 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

... speak into a phonograph and reproduce your voice. There's no reason why you can't think and reproduce that too, if you know how," ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... wand, muttering strange sounds as he did so, for in addition to his palmistry, which he seemed not disposed to exhibit that night, he dealt in mysteries beyond human ken. A voice, quite evidently from a phonograph buried in the depths of the altar, answered in an unknown language which sounded much like "Al-ya wa-aa haal-ya waa-ha." Across the dim room flashed a pale blue light with a crackling noise, the visible rays from a Crookes tube, I verily ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... that Edison conceived an idea of associating with his phonograph, which had then achieved a marked success, an instrument which would reproduce to the eye the effect of motion by means of a swift and graded succession of pictures, so that the reproduction of articulate sounds as in the phonograph, would be accompanied by the reproduction of the motion ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing

... 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 that ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers

... were pretty sick of it. Full of roistering young idiots. Piano and phonograph going at once, pairs of gigglers in the pantry at the refrigerator, pairs on the stairs and on the verandah, cigar-ashes—my cigars—and cigarettes over everything, and more infernal spooning going on than I've ever seen in ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... with pitying indulgence that school which, only a few years ago, in the person of one of its most famous members, Dr. Bouillaud, mercilessly condemned the exponent of Edison's invention, because the savant, listening to a phonograph for the first time, could not believe that it was anything else than ventriloquism! Instances of this kind are sufficiently numerous and recent not to be forgotten, in spite of the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... A library and an amusement room, supplied with good books, magazines, papers, a billiard or pool table, and a phonograph, are a source ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... practical application of the ideas of others. However, it was Alexander Graham Bell, long a Smithsonian Regent and friend of its third Secretary S. P. Langley, who, with his Volta Laboratory associates made practical the phonograph, which has been called Edison's most ...
— Development of the Phonograph at Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory • Leslie J. Newville

... to be drawn out of it under any 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 Merevale, ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse

... recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele

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

... the phonograph in all of us, but in the sort of eminent person who makes public speeches about education and reading, and who gives away prizes and opens educational institutions, there seems to be little else ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... more costly, 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 efficient doctors for an emergency, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... for dinner to-night, Minnie," she informed me. "We didn't want Mr. von Inwald to have a wrong idea of American society, especially after Mr. Carter's ridiculous conduct this afternoon, and I wonder if you'll be sweet enough to start the phonograph in the orchestra gallery as we go in—something with dignity, you know—the wedding march, or the ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart

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

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

... played several Hawaiian musical selections on her phonograph. If any of her friends had owned or played a ukelele, doubtless the plaintive music would have ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt

... only on "visually perceptible" copies. 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 work that ...
— Supplementary Copyright Statutes • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.

... and write me how things are going. Do not use soap again when you wash the shell in the aquarium. If the parrot becomes lonesome—you can always tell because he goes back to swearing—let him hear the phonograph for half an hour night and morning, if you are too busy to ring the dinner bell to amuse him. Be careful about the gas—so many girls are dying that way now—but whatever you do, do not neglect the parrot; he is such ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... philistine in art, and pledging himself if ever he was Premier again to do more for 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, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

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

... you think I am, a phonograph record?" asked Jerry. But he good-naturedly recited the ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson

... 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 only ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... before he succeeded in mastering the various adjustments of the phonograph, and ventured to hear himself "pop." Listening with critical intentness, he discovered that two sentences were missing. Grimly he tried again. The word that had been so long his stumbling block suddenly ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various

... work to give musical programs and to suggest that the plants begin each day's activities with playing the Star-spangled Banner—to tell the men what they are working for. 2. To conduct community sings in large cities. 3. To collect phonograph records for the boys in army camps, establishing central depots in every locality in the country. 4. To give talks, with song illustrations, on the history of the United States of America in colleges, high schools, women's clubs, ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... American mind has been in invention; how much civilization has been advanced by the steamboat, the cotton-gin, the sewing-machine, the reaping-machine, the typewriter, the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph. Do you know, have you had occasion to learn, that there is no hospitality for invention nowadays? There is no encouragement for you to set your wits at work to improve the telephone, or the camera, or some piece of machinery, or some mechanical process; you are not invited to find a shorter ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... expand at all when the happy (?) faculty of man's ingenuity has devastated all nature's countenance and resources with "improvements," cut down all the trees to make houses of, and turned all the green waterways into horse-power for machinery. Then we shall have cotton-mill epics, phonograph elegies from the tops of tall buildings; and then ragtime music, which interprets that divine art only for vulgar heels and toes, will take the place of ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... swallow your hook with a Montana copper-mine prospectus fastened on it. And we've a couple of electric launches; and I'll tell you what we do every night or two—we tow a rowboat behind each one with a big phonograph and a boy to change the discs in 'em. On the water, and twenty yards behind you, they are not so bad. And there are passably good roads through the woods where we go motoring. I shipped two cars up there. And the Pinecliff Inn is only three miles away. You know the Pinecliff. ...
— Options • O. Henry

... affectionate remembrance. Years afterwards, when Mrs. Stevenson was living in San Francisco after the death of her husband, two of her friends, Doctor and Mrs. Russell Cool, went to Tahiti, and were commissioned by her to visit Chief Ori a Ori. The Cools took with them a phonograph and themselves made records of a speech by Ori to Mrs. Stevenson, which, with its translation, was afterwards reproduced for her in San Francisco. But let us hear Mrs. Cool's own story ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... of warships barring exit to the Atlantic that made them extremely cautious. So Captain Koenig let his vessel lay on the bottom of the channel for a day and a night while the men enjoyed themselves with a phonograph and rousing German songs. When their enemies thinned out to some extent the submarine started again on her way and headed directly for Baltimore, which she reached without ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... quietly, and passed unobserved into the third stall. The wall which divided one room from another was of pine boarding and did not reach the ceiling. As the eavesdropper slid to a seat a phonograph in front began the Merry Widow waltz. Noiselessly Flandrau stood on the cushioned bench with his ear close to the top of the dividing wall. He could hear a murmur of voices but could not make out a word. The record ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine

... not much to look 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

... making nature give an intelligent response may well be regarded with wondering interest. The odd, we might say humorous, feature of the invention is that nature, being as it were cornered and compelled to respond, will answer nothing except to repeat what is said in her ear! The phonograph may be defined as a mechanical parrot. Unlike the living bird, however, it never makes answers malapropos. It never deviates from the original text. The distrust which has been justly cherished against the talking bird on account of his originality can ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various

... end—that is to say, an end 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 useful to us? A man ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... 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 people who haven't been fossilised by clammy ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell

... in mind as a possible solution of the difficulty of razor-grinding, but have not tried it. I imagine one would use a soft steel or ivory slip rubbed over with fine diamond dust and oil by means of an agate. The lap used in the phonograph works was rotated ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall

... phonograph was promptly started, Jacqueline explaining that the young men were going to teach them ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... factors. The lady need not suffer long from inquietude concerning her husband's safe arrival; for the receiving instrument of her telautograph reproduces instantaneously his own handwriting. A parcel, sent to her by express, contains a cylinder to the improved phonograph. When bringing it in proper contact with this wonderful instrument, she hears her consort's voice, just as if he was by her side, and a thousand leagues were but a few inches. Moreover, Edison's kimetograph portrays the beloved features of her absent spouse. ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler

... had sent him a phonograph for his Christmas present the previous year, and it had been an unending source of comfort and pleasure to him as well as to his neighbours and friends. There was one record that Arthur put on only when he was alone, for it was Thursa's own voice ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung

... based on an entirely new principle, in every way different from the phonograph," he explained. "As you can see there are no discs or cylinders, but these spools of extremely fine steel wire. The record is not made mechanically on a cylinder, but electromagnetically on ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve

... sing only a unisono melody. Mrs. Curtis Burlin, unlike most former collectors, has recorded not only the melody and words, but the whole choral folk-song, as sung in the South, with all its different voices. To secure entire accuracy in so difficult a task, a phonograph was used and the work was mainly accomplished in all its wealth of octave at Hampton Institute, Virginia, under the auspices of which the collection was undertaken and for the benefit of which the publications are made. Not content with a by-ear approximation ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various

... did not understand, or 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 repeating it. ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... 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 ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon

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

... the boy ranchers sounded and resounded as they tramped along the now dry water-course of what had, only a day before, been a life-giving stream of water. The rocky and roughly-vaulted roof overhead gave back the noises like the soundbox of a phonograph, and the lads had to speak loudly, in places, to make their voices carry above the echoes. These places were spots where the vaulted roof of the tunnel was ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

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

... too wide open to take any stock in it. We may like it when we read it in a book, but we wouldn't submit to it. We're too inquiring. If a god leaned out of a cloud of fire and spoke to us to-day we'd put the spectroscope on his cloud, get a moving picture of him, and take his voice on a phonograph record; and we wouldn't believe him ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... 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 for ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... on moonlight nights from mandolin strings and young folks sparkin'. Or turnin' up just as likely as not in some old guy's whistle on the top of one of these 'ere omnibuses in London Town. Or travellin' even in a phonograph through the wonders of the great Sahara Desert. Something all simple—I mean that you could hum without even botherin' with the words. Something people would know who you was even if there wasn't any words!—Something all sweet and low——'Sweet and Low,' that's it! My Mother used ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... Gravity, Artesian Wells, Air, Aneroid Barometer, Ear-Trumpet, Stethoscope, Audiphone, Telephone, Phonograph, Microphone, Megaphone, Tasimeter, Bathometer, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... cottage were clean and light, supplied with books and pictures, simple toys, and a phonograph. The yard was one wide green and golden play-ground, and all day the music of children's glad crooning and the singing of girls went echoing and trembling through the trees, as they played and sewed and washed ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... dreams) to long conversations between my father and mother in the old drawing-room at Passy, while Gogo was absorbed in his book; and every word that had passed through Gogo's inattentive ears into his otherwise preoccupied little brain had been recorded there as in a phonograph, and was now repeated over and over again for Peter Ibbetson, as he sat ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... jingo, but the 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 ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... senator's son a very promising young man. Consequently, it can well be imagined that the four young people spent a most enjoyable time that evening in the mansion. The girls played on the piano and all sang, and then some rugs were pushed aside, a phonograph was brought into action, and they danced a number of the latest steps, with the ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer

... humanity from righteousness must be deeply understood. Look at Booker T. Washington, or at Jacob A. Riis! What daring, what indefatigable toil, what insight, patience, and swerveless hope have been put into their task! Edison is said to have spent six months hissing S into his phonograph to make it repeat that letter, and many days he worked seventeen hours a day. Have many ministers ever bent themselves in this way to solve a special moral problem—that of, say, a disobedient child in the congregation? Have they spent six months, hours and hours a day, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... 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 of ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... walkie-talkie [Mil.], handie-talkie, citizen's band, CB, amateur radio, ham radio, short-wave radio, police band, ship-to-shore radio, airplane radio, control tower communication; (communication) 525, 527, 529, 531, 532; electronic devices [devices for recording and reproducing recorded sound], phonograph, gramophone, megaphone, phonorganon^. [device to convert sound to electrical signals] microphone, directional microphone, mike, hand mike, lapel microphone. [devices to convert recorded sound to electronic signals] phonograph ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... must have 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

... 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. But—know them ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... 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

... it that science differs from art on all these points. Science is not national, it is essentially cosmopolitan. The science of one country is the same as that of another country. It is impossible to tell by looking at it whether the phonograph was invented in England or America. Unlike art, again, science is essentially transmissible; every discovery leads of necessity to another discovery, and the fact that science is with us to-day proves that science will be still more with us to-morrow. ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore

... Carrie Cook sat with a book The phonograph played sweetly. Then came the rocket and it ...
— The Rocket Book • Peter Newell

... Nice! Promenade des Anglais! That's something more wonderful than the telephone and phonograph! If you had told me that the Pantheon had landed one fine night on the banks of the Paillon, I should not be more astonished. I thought Madame Desvarennes was as deeply rooted in Paris as the Colonne Vendome! But tell me, what is the object of ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... beef extract. Every drop of blood is saved in this factory, being dried and made into chicken feed or something else that is useful. Chicago, however, goes Fray Bentos one better for there you know the squeal is caught by the phonograph and the ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... from Milsand, the poet said: "No words 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

... something truly noble they should put those moving picture shows out of business. Pretty soon when they want the chorus to show up they will let down a sheet, throw on the picture and turn loose, 'Welcome, your highness, welcome' on the phonograph. I ain't mentioning any names, but there is a bunch of these parties that belong ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey

... there are everywhere large halls, and people come from all the country round to attend a concert. Men who look as though they had driven a grocery wagon, or like occupation, sit and listen so attentively and with such evident enjoyment. I am sure the circulation of the phonograph records has much to do with America's present ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower

... another 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. ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone

... by the date of issue, "not a single one short of that." Then suddenly, at the end of February, the rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly hold the pen. He conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and wrote Howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... asked him to tell his tale to the others. But he told it quite differently, and left me wondering which version was the better. He could not repeat himself if he tried, whereas most of the renowned talkers I have met will go over the old impression with the certainty of a phonograph. ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... Frost, the leading druggist of Milton Falls, Vt., set a big bottle of medicine in his show window with a sign sayin' he'd give a phonograph to anybody who could tell how many spoonfuls there was in the bottle. Jed Ballard was comin' downstreet, and when he seen the sign he went and he sez, sezzee, "Levi," sezzee, "if you had a spoon big enough to hold it all, you'd have ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor

... approve of dimples, and he says I am soft. And he has the most desperate old chum you ever saw, a perfect wreck with red whiskers, and they get together every night and play pinochle and smoke smelly old pipes, and he won't have curtains in his bedroom, and he is crazy about a phonograph, and he won't ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston

... You see, my dear, youll exhaust Sinjon's conversation too in a week or so. A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor. In the end you have to be content with his common humanity; and when you come down to that, you find out ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... go to the theater in droves called theater parties and absolutely ruin the evening for others who happen to sit in front of them. If Mary and Johnny and Susy and Tommy want to talk and giggle, why not arrange chairs in rows for them in a drawing-room, turn on a phonograph as an accompaniment and let them ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... "Wonderful until you know how, eh? Like most things. Still I must say that our friend here speaks English something like a phonograph, and if he'll excuse me saying so, which of course he will, he doesn't seem to have much ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith

... this incident the polar night began to shut down in grim earnest. Sometimes for days the boys and the other adventurers would be confined to the huts. Entertainments were organized and phonograph concerts given, and, when it was possible to venture out, hunting trips in a neighboring seal-ground were attempted. All these things helped to while away the monotony of the long darkness. In the meantime the commanders of the expedition ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... of his telephonic discovery and of his astonishing phonograph, Edison offered me his arm and took me to the dining-room, where I found his family assembled. I was very tired, and did justice to the supper that had been so ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... 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 part in ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes

... certain you had it. It's the dearest place of the kind I've ever seen, my dear, and if every single person I know who is in this vicinity doesn't come here at least once a week and spend lots and lots of money I'll never speak to them again. I'm going to turn myself into a walking phonograph, my dear, with just one record: 'If you love me visit the For'ard Lookout.' And of course everyone loves me—how can they help it? So—well, just ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln

... 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 ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer

... Salvation Army put up a hut for their work. A number of soldiers assisted. They put up a stove, brought their piano and phonograph, and made the place look cheerful. Then they got the regimental band and had an opening, the first big thing that was recognized by the military authorities. The Salvation Army Staff-Captain in charge of that zone took a long board and set candles on it and put it above ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill

... long 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, ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... presence of the objects. They are but pieces of delicate apparatus serving to record or to receive primary impressions from outside. Wonderful as they are, they have their counterparts in the works of man, as for instance: the camera, or artificial eye; the phonograph, or, artificial ear; the delicate chemical apparatus, or artificial taster and smeller; the telegraph, or artificial nerves. Not only this, but there are always to be found nerve telegraph wires conveying the messages of the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, to the brain—telling ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... bouquets of flowers. Arrived at a broad space near the summer-house, the company, after a series of low and preliminary bows, launched forth into a stately dance. Katrina, conscious of music, descried an individual in very modern blue overalls, who manipulated a phonograph. A voice from beyond the summer-house, called forth instructions at intervals, with a huskiness vaguely suggestive ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... plays on this instrument every sound struck on the keys represents a certain vowel-consonant sound. Thus the listener hears the sounds more distinctly than we hear the words of a phonograph. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... scattered over a dim, stumpy clearing, lights shone through trees that were still standing, a meandering trail led past a straggling row of canvas-topped structures, and from one of these issued the wavering, metallic notes of a phonograph, advertising the place as ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... 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 invalid ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... 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

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

... 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 front of ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills

... no two voices are exactly alike, just as no two violins ever produce precisely the same sound. I think it is what they call the timbre that is different. I have, for instance, never heard a voice like Mr. Pitman's, although Mr. Harry Lauder's in a phonograph resembles it. And voices have always done for me what odors do for some people, revived forgotten scenes and old memories. But the memory that the voice at the head of the stairs brought back was ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... sounds round and sweet like the 'cello in the Macdonough Theater orchestra. And it never goes high up, or sharp, or squeaky, or scratchy, like some women's voices when they're mad, or fresh, or excited, till they remind me of a bum phonograph record. Why, your voice, it just goes through me till I'm all trembling—like with the everlastin' cool of it. It's it's straight delicious. I guess angels in heaven, if they is any, must have ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... phonograph with a rasping voice that plays from morning to night. The soldiers love it; the poor things are so used to noise that they don't seem happy without it, but sometimes I feel as if ...
— 'My Beloved Poilus' • Anonymous

... 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 ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell

... world, and I will soon be able to overtake more work. I wonder what the Andersons and the Goldies and the Edgerleys will say when they see that we can cycle twenty miles in the bush!" The Commissioner had also brought out a phonograph with him, and she was asked to speak into it. She recited In Efik the story of the Prodigal Son, and when the words came forth again, the natives were electrified, "Does not that open up possibilities," she said, "for carrying the Gospel messages ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone

... letter on the table. The last line of that short missive kept repeating itself over and over, as if his brain were a phonograph which he had no ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... 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 ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... a close. One of its neglected aspects, however, may be indicated within the present context, by remarking upon the feeling of incompleteness that would at this stage, be left in the mind of the hearer, if I should make an end, abruptly, like a phonograph stopped in the middle of a tune. My discourse would inevitably be left at loose ends, owing to the persistency of a number of questions which have been raised, agitated, but not fully set at rest. These ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... like a mince pie of cogs here, but when it is put into shape it will be a simple little arrangement. This is a recording instrument which combines the phonograph and the dictagraph. One purpose—the most practical, is that a business man may dictate his letters and memoranda while sitting at his desk, in his office, instead of having a machine with a phonograph in his private office taking up space and ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... the car at the Hayden house, and carried her note to the door. When she went in, however, she was instantly uncomfortable. The place reeked with smoke, and undeniably there was dancing going on somewhere. A phonograph was scraping noisily. Delight's small nose lifted a little. What a deadly place! Coming in from the fresh outdoors, the noise and smoke and bar-room ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Calderon y Tellez. This same fellow that's 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 ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... 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 • O. Henry

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

... electrolyzing moles—to what end? Looking handsome. Oh, what a mistake! It's the larynx that the beauty doctors ought to work on. It's words more than warts, talk more than talcum, palaver more than powder, blarney more than bloom that counts—the phonograph instead of the photograph. But I was going ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... the evening he met her. He sat alongside of her in an agony of confused Bliss, with a Temperature of 104 and the Vocal Chords entirely paralyzed. And yet, as a rule, he was just as reliable as a Phonograph. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade

... the panel 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 ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... up out of that hole, and it seemed to Marmaduke that he could see those words as well as hear them. Now that is a very odd thing, but it is actually what happened—he could both see and hear them—and they looked like the funny music on phonograph advertisements—something like this: ...
— Half-Past Seven Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson

... knew it couldn't be. For, though some dolls have inside them a little phonograph that can say words, Sue's Jane ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope

... 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 to ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... longer would they be permitted to ride in a slow, clumsy wagon, but, instead, would ride in an electric car. Furthermore, when night came, instead of the tallow candle, they would marvel at the brilliant electric lights. Wouldn't it be fun to start the phonograph and watch them stare in astonishment as "the wooden box" talked to them? But the most fun would be to take them to the moving picture show and hear what ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford

... number of inventions and innovations forestalled by Punch's pen are many. In December, 1848, much is made of a proposed "opera telakouphanon"—a forecast of the telephone, phonograph, and theatrophone combined:— ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann



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



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