The clause below seem in the January 3 , 1908 Des Moines Daily News ( Des Moines , Iowa ) under the title , “ The Poor Past Centuries . ” The piece name a ceremony in Paris where phonographic records were bury beneath an opera menage , to be unfold in 2007 . woefully , I have not heard if this gem has been unearth yet .
article like these remind me of the genuine sense of wonder hoi polloi feel about fresh inventions of the former 19th and former 20th century . Recorded euphony was to survive beyond the life of the Maker thanks to unexampled technologies . Hopefully , copyright lawwon’t keep that from find in the twenty-first one C .
That was a funny ceremony performed last week in the subterraneous passages of the opera house house in Paris . Dignified people solemnly situate in a particularly constructed burial vault phonographic records of the great voices of today . There are songs and arias by Tamaguo , Caruso , Scotti , Plancon , Pattl , Melba , Calve and others . They are to remain there , hermetically sealed , for one hundred year . Then in the twelvemonth 2007 , they will be crawfish , and the airships will check while the passengers hear the historical voices of “ the last hundred . ”
It ’s when we read of such things and think what they think of that we begin to understand what a wonderful historic period this is in which we are living , how unlike it is from other ages , and what it might have mean to us if the things we know today had been fuck hundreds of years ago .
speculate the phonograph alone was nothing new ?
We could go today and command all the medicine of the 100 . We could hear while Bach played the organ , Amati the fiddle and while Arion span his mouth harp . We could learn Paganini . We could listen to Palestrina directing the choir in the church service of Santa Maria Maggioro , or to Father Ambrose chanting in the dim cathedral at Milan . We might even hear again of David in the psalms , or go back to the shores of the Red sea and listen to the vocal of Miraim .
And this is only a little in the land of euphony alone . There are the orators and the poets and the actor who might verbalize for us . Webster and Patrick Henry and Sapphe and Homer and Demothsenes and Aeschylus – the voices of chronicle in our pose elbow room !
But what is the record player ? Only one little invention of a pack . Rameses could never call up the great Great Pyramid . William the conqueror never dream of wireless telegraphy . Xerxes never find out a moving pic . Charlemagne never even get a glimpse of a single galvanizing lighter .
At this moment the cub reporter conjure up himself . He has been to college .
“ No , ” he said , “ and Darius never had any breakfast food . ”
“ And Adam did n’t have no street gondola , ” observed the other boy .
See also : garden of beam Electrical Flowers ( 1900)Moving Sidewalk ( 1900)Moving Sidewalk Mechanics ( 1900 )
euphony
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