25
RESTO
November 13, 1920.
TALKI
"mistakes the main problem confronting the
scientific and everybody else as well. It is not
As was to have been expected, the latest scien- how to communicate with the dead; it is whether
tific adventure of Thomas A. Edison has brought there are any dead to communicate with. View-
upon him the customary pack of poodles, some ing the matter this way, the construction of a
larger than others, yelping at the giant because of machine to facilitate communication seems de-
his faith in a future that seems not so very far
cidedly too previous. Much more logical and
away. Preachers have ridiculed the inventor's
useful is the course of Professor Crawford of
idea that he may be able to produce a machine so
Belfast, who has gone to work with rule and line
delicate that it may be played upon by unseen
—and scales and gauges and a phonograph—to
hands and intelligences. One literary clergyman
determine the exact nature of certain 'psychic'
has gone so far as to declare that "what Mr.
occurrences whose reality he could not question,
Edison don't know about immortality would fill
at least as mere phenomena."
a large volume." But the learned pulpiteer—a
How is Mr. Edison to know whether there are
profession that often demands little brains in
any
dead to communicate with until he can get
these days—failed to say how much he or any
in
touch
with some of those who have "gone
other expounder really knows about the same
before" and secures further confirmation of the
subject.
tales of the seers and mystics who have told con-
You can't study immortality in books. There fidently of the results of their investigations?
is only one Book that tells anything about it, and No doubt Mr. Edison has read Scripture and
that Book closes the Golden Gates in the face of doesn't believe that there are any dead. Did he
any investigator sufficiently bold to go hand in believe in the "dead" he probably wouldn't bother
hand with Charon to the borders of the other himself with inventions devised to enable the
shore. But Mr. Edison believes that he can help "dead" to communicate.
to solve the greatest of all mysteries. Why should
The trouble is that there is too much awe and
science or the clergy oppose him in that ?
mysticism surrounding everything that has to
Even so sane a newspaper as the New York do with what is to come after this life. We
Sun declares that in his latest effort Mr. Edison believe that there is a life everlasting and yet
"rushes in where angels fear to tread." How for some reason we hesitate to learn anything
does the Sun know that? Has any of its report- about it. If Mr. Edison can create a machine
ers taken a peep into the future and found that that will enable the "dead" to communicate with
there is danger within? Do any of these wise those who are dead and don't know it, for
people who write and preach know any more heaven's sake let him do it and then we may
about it than Conan Doyle, Oliver Lodge, Flam- know more about the better way to enjoy the
marion, Beecher, or Thos. A. Edison? Of course Sundays which we know were made for man
a trade paper, dealing only in the musical side notwithstanding that most of the religious teach-
of the subject, can not be expected to know very ers like to tell us that we were made, to "rest on
much in the matter of immortality. But it seems the Seventh day and make it holy." Mr. Edison
plain enough that Mr. Edison's critics would have gave us the marvelous phonograph. Let him alone
assumed much the same attitude towards his in his promise to give us also something by which
earlier efforts, had they been told, forty years we may talk with the "dead" who are much more
ago, that he was working on a machine that could alive than any of his critics or challengers.
use the English language—and all other lan-
guages, including their own. And the Sun seems
The H. C. Scherff Furniture Co., Marion, O., has
to be in error when it says that Mr. Edison a well-managed talking 1 machine department.
EDISON'S LATEST ADVENTURE
NEW PHONOGRAPH STORES
Many Extensions of Well Established Departments
Noted in News of the Week.
Ray Bannon of Morris, 111., will open a Victrola
shop on the main floor of the Piergue building on
Main street, Ottawa, 111., to be known as Bannon's
Victrola Shop.
W. L. R. Pffefferle will open a new music and
jewelry store on the south side of the square, Ken-
ton, O.
Fred P. Watson Company, Pinckneyville, 111., has
opened a new music store.
The Crown Phonograph Co., Inc., New York, has
opened a branch store at 1983 Second avenue.
A new Victrola department has been added by the
Kaufman & Baer Co., Pittsburgh, Pa.
Gus Louis, buyer and manager of the talking
machine department of Woodward & Lotrop, Wash-
ington, D. C, will open in business for himself with-
in a few weeks.
Edison Phonographs, Ltd., Portland, Ore., has
moved to its new three-story warehouse and office
building at Thirteenth and Everett streets.
Brewer & Burge, dealers in phonographs and sew-
ing machines, Warsaw, N. Y., has removed from the
second floor of the Whitlock-Snow store to 16 N.
Main street.
A. Raoul Silber is president of the Harmony
Shoppe, Inc., which recently opened for business in
Springfield, Mass.
The Bluff Music Shop was opened recently at
1720 Tenth street, Moline, 111.
P. E. Murphy is now sole owner of The Music
Shop. Battle Creek, Mich.
STARR IN CANADA.
The permanent home in St. John, N. B., of the
Maritime Division Starr Co. of Canada, Ltd., manu-
facturers of Starr phonographs and Gennett records,
is at 171-173 Prince William street. W. A. Dietrich,
formerly credit manager of Gunss, Ltd., Toronto, is
manager of the Maritime Division. The assistant
manager is E. W. Wood, a man of experience in the
sales department.
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