But the hosts of this great reception found the American barbarity of taste redeemed by vigor of invention. The most dramatic embodiment -- for Europeans, and especially for the French -- of this quality of technological enterprise was Thomas Alva Edison. Edison was hailed as a universal talent who had grown up with no formal education, no advantages of aristocratic privilege or patronage. For the French people, who were still working through the first, tentative stages of their Third Republic, Edison symbolized the potential of human genius unhampered by artificial social constraints. Historian Raymond Isay has accurately assessed what Edison meant to the world in 1878:
Self-taught engineer, savant who remained a worker, the train-boy become a millionaire, Thomas Alva Edison . . . with him, a new ideal of civilization comes to the people; an ideal on which the three most powerful myths -- mystiques! —of the modern age are based: the American myth, the myth of democracy, and the myth of science.15
For the hard-of-hearing, Edison had invented the megaphone. Fairgoers were astonished to hear how sound could be amplified with Edison's device. "This instrument," he told them, "can be placed on the knees of a deaf person in a theater, and the sounds can be intensified in the proportion of one to fifty, in the same manner as an opera glass intensifies the view."16
Even more acclaimed was the phonograph. The recording machine on display at the 1878 exposition was a simple mechanical device that used a mouthpiece for activating a notched disk which in turn made indentations for playback on tinfoil wrapped around a brass cylinder. First shown at the Philadelphia Exposition two years before, this device sent European journalists into ecstasies. In 1877, Edison showed his machine to British audiences, where they heard "God Save the Queen" sing forth from the strange device. One Parisian gazette even predicted — perhaps with malice ? — that the phonograph would render useless the tenors of the opera. A. Bitard wrote that some people in the audience at the phonograph booth suspected a trick — ventriloquism. But when the skeptics were finally satisfied that the device was authentic, people enthusiastically predicted marvelous uses for the phonograph. It could be used to teach foreign languages, said Bitard, by having speakers record equivalent French and English phrases for learners to hear and master. Edison himself had wide ambitions for his brainchild:
Here, you see, is a book for the ignorant, who have never learned to read. It will be used to make toys talk. . . It will be used by actors to learn the right reading of passages. In fact,its utility will be endless.17
One writer for L'Exposition Universelle de 1878 summed up the potential impact of this machine by comparing it to the two other great advances in communication of his century:
If space has been conquered by the telephone — as it has already been conquered, in a different fashion, by the telegraph — it is time that is conquered by the phonograph