"Yes," he went on—and his voice choked up the more he tried to make it strong—"you have set down all that the others know and the greater part of what they dream about; but I am greater. I can, to borrow from Poe, create worlds in movement, and blazing, roaring spheres with the sound from matter without a soul; and I have surpassed Lucifer in that I can force inorganic things to blaspheme. Night and day, according to my will, skins which were alive, and metals which perhaps are not yet so, utter lifeless words; and if it is true that the voice creates universes in space, those that I have caused it to create are worlds that have died before they came to life. In my house lies a Behemoth that bellows at a wave of my hand; I have invented a talking machine."

From Marcel Schwob's story "The Talking Machine," translated by John A. Green. You can read it in full (as a PDF) by going here and searching for "Vol. 006 No. 1."

Last year, searching for information about Schwob, I kept seeing the name John A. Green. Green was a professor of French at Brigham Young University. He died recently, so I'll never get the story of how and why he came to dedicate so much of his life to Schwob. From a 1989 human interest story I found online about him: "In 1981, at a relatively young age, [Green] suffered a stroke that wiped out his memory of both French and English and left him basically paralyzed.... Painstakingly, he began the process of relearning how to read, to walk, and to talk. Within months, he was back in his office, going over his notes, first reviewing, then resuming his research. In the past few years, Brother Green has completed several carefully-researched volumes on French writer Marcel Schwob. Two of the volumes, part of a planned set of seven, are in print already [ed: these are in French; I asked the person archiving Green's papers]. Perhaps most amazing of all, Prof. Green has typed every letter of every word of these books with one finger of his left hand. Every weekday, from 8AM to 5PM, he works quietly in his office, completing the task he has given himself—a task for which he receives no compensation beyond the disability pay he would still receive if he chose to relax at home."


Green thinks an interview with Edison influenced Schwob's "Talking Machine." It was included in an 1889 article which ran in a small newspaper owned by Schwob's father. Here's the excerpt Green provides:

On the subject of the phonograph our colleague [a reporter of the New York Herald] asked if it had been brought to its highest degree of perfection.

"Almost, I believe," said Mr. Edison, "in the latest instruments produced in my workshops. You understand that the phonograph ordinarily used in business does not come up to the special machines I use for my private experiments. With these latter I can obtain a sound powerful enough to reproduce the sentences of a discourse that a large audience can listen to without any difficulty.

"My latest improvements have to do especially with the aspirate sounds -- the weak point in our present gramophones. For seven months I have been working 18 and 20 hours a day on the single word 'specia' [sic]. I would say into the phonograph 'specia, specia, specia,' and the instrument would answer back 'pecia, pecia, pecia' and I couldn't get it to do anything else. It was enough to drive me mad. I kept at it, however, until I had succeeded and now you can read a thousand words from a newspaper into a phonograph at the rate of 150 words per minute and the machine will repeat them back to you without one omission.

"You will appreciate the difficulty of the task that I accomplished when I tell you that the impressions made on the cylinder when the aspiration of 'specia' is produced are no greater than a millionth of an inch in depth and are invisible even under the microscope.

"That is just to give you an idea of my work. I am not a theoretician and I don't pretend to be a savant. Everyone applauds the theoreticians and the savants, when they explain, in a very formal language, what someone else has done. But all of their formulated knowledge put together has never given the world more than two or three inventions of any value. It's easy to invent astonishing things, but the difficulty comes in perfecting them enough to give them some commercial value. It's the latter kind of inventions that interest me."

"And what new discoveries will be made in the field of electricity?"

"Well, that's difficult to say. We may, one of these days, run up against one of the great secrets of nature."