over unless there were some new stress, rhythm, or nuance in interpersonal relations that gave it relevance. It was while handling paper tape, impressed by Morse Code dots and dashes, that Edison noticed the sound given off when the tape moved at high speed resembled human talk heard indistinctly " It then occurred to him that indented tape could record a telephone message. Edison became aware of the limns of lineality and the sterility of specialism as soon as he entered the electric field. "Look," he said, "it's like this. I start 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 contained all answers when one could discover a means of rendering them explicit. In his own case, his determination to give the phonograph, like the telephone, a direct practical use in business procedures led to his neglect of the instrument as a means of entertainment. Failure to foresee the phonograph as a means of entertainment was really a failure to grasp the meaning of the electric revolution in general. In our time we are reconciled to the phonograph as a toy and a solace; but press, radio, and TV have also acquired the same dimension of entertainment. Meantime, entertainment pushed to an extreme becomes the main form of business and politics.