here with the intention of reaching here in an experiment, say, 
to increase the speed of the Atlantic cable; but when I’ve 
arrived part way in my straight line, I meet with a phenomenon, 
and it leads me off in another direction and develops into a 
phonograph.” Nothing could more dramatically express the 
turning point from mechanical explosion to electrical implosion. 
Edison’s own career embodied that very change in our world, 
and he himself was often caught in the confusion between the 
two forms of procedure.

     It was just at the end of the nineteenth century that the 
psychologist Lipps revealed by a kind of electric audiograph 
that the single clang of a bell was an intensive manifold 
containing all possible symphonies. It was somewhat on the 
same lines that Edison approached his problems. Practical 
experience had taught him that embryonically all problems