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 records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication." These words of Edison, published in the North .American Review of June, 1878, illustrate how the then recent telephone invention already had the power to color thinking in other fields. So, the record player had to be seen as a kind of phonetic record of telephone conversation. Hence, the names "phonograph" and "gramophone." Behind the immediate popularity of the phonograph was the entire electric implosion that gave such new stress and importance to actual speech rhythms in music, poetry, and dance alike. Yet the phonograph was a machine merely. It did not at first use an electric motor or circuit. But in providing a mechanical extension of the human voice and the new ragtime melodies, the phonograph was propelled into a central place by some of the major currents of the age. The fact of acceptance of a new phrase or a speech form, or a dance rhythm is already direct evidence ot some actual development to which it is significantly related. Take, for example, the shift of English into an interrogative mood, since the arrival of "How about that?" Nothing could induce people to begin suddenly to use such a phrase over an