into the future; the picture seems too dim. There are items of cost and conditions that must be gone into more thoroughly and changed before any such Utopian idea can be realized. Still, there has been invented a new talking picture. Let us see who did it, how, what it is. When I asked George R. Webb, who has an office in the heart of New York, if he was the inventor of this machine, he made light of it. ton "We've been working on this thing, ten years," he began. "I was president of some telephone lines down Wilmingway. (Struggling inventor!-Ye gods!) Well, our plant wasn't paying as well as it should, so I began looking for ways to utilize the system. There was always a big lull in the evenings, you know, and I wanted to see if we couldn't make use of our wires then. It occurred to me to send music by wire, to transmit it from a central station into the homes of our subscribers, to accomplish it in such a way that they wouldn't have to hold a receiver to their ears. In our Wilmington plant, we began experimenting. We rigged up a talking machine with some necessary mechanical changes and installed it in what I called our private workshop. From this room we ran a wire to an office in another part of the building. Then we turned on the talking machine and hoped that the sounds would be reproduced in the other room." At this point one of his associates laughed. He seemed to recall something. "And for two years the thing wouldn't even croak," he chuckled. "We thought Webb was cracked." But Webb kept on. He built different transmitters and different horns. One day a faint sound issued from the reproducer on the top floor. It was a snatch of a popular song of the day. But it was only a snatch. Webb changed the reproducer a bit and tried again. In SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR ADJUSTING GRAPHOPHONE RECORD "Down in Wilming ton from noon until eleven o'clock at night one can 'call in sweet of horn. In fact, he made a thousand different types before he obtained one that would reproduce full round tones, unspoiled by any metallic scraping. Then came a day when he added an inch and a half to the length of the horn and found he had the secret. He told his friends it produced a tone clearer even than that of the best known talking machine. After they had heard it they were convinced. "I'll tell you what I did," said Webb, as he called for a boy to bring him this wonderful horn. "I remembered the human throat as being the perfect mechanism for the utterance of articulate sounds; and I modeled the shape of my horn after it." The horn he showed me bore out this statement. After we had examined it he went on to say that they had continued their experiments in a Baltimore plant. Here he found it was possible to send music over six different wiresmusic that was heard in six different rooms. But six weren't enough. For a good commercial proposition Webb had to have many times that number. In fact, not until he devised a water cooled transmitter, did the practicability of the invention become apparent. Using the Wilmington telephone system, he sent music over the wires one evening into one hundred and thirteen different homes! But that was only the first half of his work. It was only the perfection of the device that may make the talking picture as common in the home as the evening newspaper. In fact, Webb was not thinking about talking pictures yet. He had developed the magnaphone for speaking purposes, the instrument that you hear in the big railroad terminals announcing the arrival and departure of trains. He was installing this system in hotels, department stores, factories, schools, hospitals, asylums, baseball stadiums, and battleships. For a time it overwhelmed him. He didn't have a ducer. It magnified sound, perfected the articulation, and enabled speech speech or music put into the transmitter at one point to be given from the reproducer at distant points. And if a hundred Wilmington families heard Toreador they heard it with equal clearness-just as four hundred people in different parts of the Grand Central Station hear that the 5:15 will leave for New Rochelle on Track Seven. But with his magnaphones working successfully, with the Government just having finished a test for their use on battleships, Webb turned his attention to moving pictures. He heard the He began to direct a series of experiments. His first point of attack was the screen. He installed the vocal equipment in a different way. On the back of a moving picture frame, he placed eight of his musical reproducers, two on a side. This was to assure the voices coming from everywhere. Then he worked out a scheme for the synchronizing of these voices with the moving picture film to be shown. He did it in this way: He took a photoplay plot and had dialogue written into it. The company learned their parts. When they were perfect in them, they played the piece and a recording instrument took down every word. Then, they played the piece at the same tempo, speaking the lines so as to keep the time exactly the same and a camera caught their actions. There he had the two sides of it,-for the eye, the ear. All he now had to do was to produce them together. He rigged up a talking machine beside the moving picture projector. Wires were run from the talking machine to the different reproducers behind the screen. Each wire took up mechanically its thread of the speaking. Then the projector and the talking machine were run in unison. The words of the characters came from that part of the screen where they happened to be. So much for the Webb talking picture. He is going into it on a big scale. He is giving demonstrations now on Broadway. He has a studio on the outskirts of New York. He is going to prepare films as quickly as possible. He believes he will completely revolutionize the moving picture field. He believes that the "talkie" now on the market lacks realism because every voice seems to come from the same place. He thinks that the public will respond to what he considers his more realistic plan of having voices actually seem to come from the characters. He is not going to do anything about supplying music and pictures to homes for some time. He may never do anything about it. He does not know whether it will work out. Under present conditions he is dubious about its practicability. His chief objection appears to be caused by the human element, by the necessity of starting every home. show from a Central office simultaneously. But there is a big idea behind what he has done and what he or somebody else will do. It is the idea of carrying on our amusements by big scale productions, just as most of the bread that New York eats today is supplied by one concern. The idea of service to the individual now includes the idea of accommodation. We have come to the point where we consider the ease with which our desires may be catered to. Soon we may think it very pleasant to simply call up some office and ask them to turn talking moving pictures into our home for the evening. Webb admits that it is only a question of practicability. Suppose that two hundred families wanted to spend the evening with talking picture parties picture parties in their homes. As Webb's device now stands, he can have his men install two hundred sets of screens, projectors, and reproducers during the afternoon. After dinner from two switchboards in his central station, each controlling one hundred wires, the dialogue of the play can be sent through the transmitters while parallel wires start the moving picture reels. And when it is all over new films can be put on. An apparatus of this sort will be in use tomorrow. It is as certain as the telephone. It is bound to come. The trend is toward specialization of the wants of the individual. Luxuries are becoming necessities to the American people. What is the unique toy of today will be the established necessity of tomorrow. When Webb first thought of sending music over telephone wires, his friends laughed. Now, down in Wilmington from noon until eleven o'clock at night one can "call in sweet music". All that remains to be cleared away is the obstacle of cost and that will be lowered just as the price of automobiles has been lowered. WHERE THE MAP IS A BLANK By BAILEY MILLARD J UST before Sir John Franklin, the great British explorer and seafighter, set out on his illfated Arctic voyage, there were black rumors of war in England. "Would you not rather remain among When the intrepid Scott clinched, as it were, by duplicating the feat, Amundsen's discovery of the South Pole, the world's last rood of hitherto undiscovered territory was not thereby entered upon the map. Vast stretches of unknown, mysterious regions still beckon to the adventurous. There are literally millions of square miles of land - including all the continents, save Europe where the foot of white man has never trod. What secrets lie unfathomed in these veiled vastnesses? Mr. Bailey Millard presents some tantalizing hints and glimpses of all this in "Where the Map Is a Blank. the fighting captains of the British Navy than to go poking about among the icebergs?" he was asked by a friend. "Sir," replied the old warrior, "I would rather discover the Northwest Passage and add a million square miles to the known territory of the world than to have won Waterloo." Such is the intense thirst of the explorer for seeking out the unknown and filling up the blank spaces of the map. Still achieving, still pursuing, these intrepid men are every year adding to the known regions of the earth, and yet of the absolutely unknown there remains a tremendous territory. This territory, lying chiefly within the zones of intense heat and extreme cold, is estimated to contain, all told, about nine million square miles, or a space three times the size of the United States. How these far dim lands invite to adventure! How they challenge the spirit! If you will go with me, we shall visit these lands with the men who have faced the terraqueous mysteries. By far the major part of the great unknown lies within the polar regions under the frilled sky drapery of the auroral arcs. Those dim capes which Peary glimpsed in his polar flight and named Crocker Land have never been trodden by the feet of white men and perhaps have never been traversed by natives. And yet Valdemar Stefansson thinks there may be a race of beings there, and he is now on his way in the stout whaler Karluck to find out if this be so. Stefansson's expedition was planned to study the Eskimo. The hardy Canadian hopes to find in the new ice country men quite unknown and uninfluenced by whites and to discover the ancient habitations and perhaps the glyphs and instruments of a race that were contemporaneous with our stoneage ancestors of thirty thousand years ago. He wants, so he says, to push back the history of the human race. "If we find Eskimos near the pole," says Stefansson, "we may be able to guess at our common grandfather, for they must be still about on the same plane that he was." Last year Stefansson found blond Eskimos in the Arctic and sighed because he could not make moving pictures. of them. On his present expedition he is taking along a complete moving-picture outfit and on his return expects to be able to exhibit some unique "movies". He thinks it will be a wonderful opportunity to hand down a record of a vanishing race, for he thinks that mankind. is on the wane in the Arctic. Crocker Land, which Peary believes to be the corner of a new continent, is also to be explored this summer by an American expedition under Donald B. McMillan which will go in the steam-whaler Diana, sailing by way of Ellesmere Land and Nansen Land and on to the great unknown territory which contains, so Peary estimates, nearly half a million square miles. Besides Crocker Land, which is in one corner, another corner, he believes, is north of Point Barrow, another near Bennett Island, and another near Banks Land. His chief arguments as to the existence of this continent are based upon soundings which show a constant tendency toward shoaling as the borders of the unknown land are approached, and upon the known existence of Crocker Land. ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF KANGAROOLAND These giant cliffs bar the way to the great desert of western Australia, FANNY WORKMAN AND HER AIDES She scaled Nun Kun in the Himalayas and set an altitude record for women. |