Mr. Edison's latest phonograph has been fitted with a sort
of speaking-trumpet, which has rendered it loud-speaking, so that a considerable group can hear what it says or sings or plays without the help of a conducting-tube to each person's ear. If the trumpet arrangement for magnifying the sound should succeed, we do not see why, by the help of the phonograph, we might not some day have the very same opera or concert, including the greatest instrumentalists and the greatest vocalists in the world, performed in every capital on the same day with the same success ; nor, indeed, why the same sermon might not be preached in fifty or five hundred pulpits at the same time, the preacher himself being present - in none or only one of this large number. But whether this would not be thought "preaching by machinery," in spite of the artistic perfection with which the phonograph would deliver the very tones and tremours of the preacher's voice, is very questionable.
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