extension and amplification of the voice that may well have 
diminished individual vocal activity, much as the car had 
reduced pedestrian activity.

     Like the radio that it still provides with program content, 
the phonograph is a hot medium. Without it, the twentieth 
century as the era of tango, ragtime, and jazz would have had 
a different rhythm. But the phonograph was involved in many 
misconceptions, as one of its early names—gramophone—
implies. It was conceived as a form of auditory writing 
(gramma -letters). It was also called “graphophone,” with the 
needle in the role of pen. The idea of it as a “talking machine” 
was especially popular. Edison was delayed in his approach to 
the solution of its problems by considering it at first as a 
“telephone repeater”; that is, a storehouse of data from the 
telephone, enabling the telephone to “provide invaluable