corporation seems wrong to anybody brought up in literate visual fragmented freedom. "I call them up at night when their guard's down," said one senior executive. In the 1 920s, the telephone spawned a good deal of dialogue humor that sold as gramophone records. But radio and the talking pictures were not kind to the monologue, even when it was made by W C. Fields or Will Rogers. These hot media pushed aside the cooler forms that TV has now brought back on a large scale. The new race of night-club entertainers (Newhart, Nichols and May) have a curious early-telephone flavor that is very welcome, indeed. We can thank TV, with its call for such high participation, that mime and dialogue are back. Our Mort Sahls and Shelley Bermans and Jack Paars are almost a variety of "living newspaper," such as was provided for the Chinese revolutionary masses by dramatic teams in the 1930s and 1940s. Brecht's plays have the same participational quality of the world of the comic strip and the newspaper mosaic that TV has made acceptable, as pop art. The mouthpiece of the telephone was a direct outgrowth of a prolonged attempt beginning in the seventeenth century to mimic human physiology by mechanical means. It is very much in the nature of the electric telephone, therefore, that it has such natural congruity with the organic. On the advice of a Boston surgeon, Dr. C. J. Blake, the receiver of the phone was directly modeled on the bone and diaphragm structure of the human ear. Bell paid much attention to the work of the great Helmholtz, whose work covered many fields. Indeed, it was because of his conviction that Helmholtz had sent vowels by telegraph that Bell was encouraged to persevere in his efforts. It turned out that it was his inadequate German that had fostered this optimistic impression. Helmholtz had failed to achieve any speech effects by wire. But Bell argued, if vowels could be sent, why not consonants? "I thought that Helmholtz. himself, had done it. and that my failure was due only to my ignorance of electricity. It