Abstract
WE have already described in a previous issue (NATURE, December 20, 1900, p. 182) the discovery of a new musical instrument in the electric arc made by Mr. Duddell and communicated by him to the Institution of Electrical Engineers last December. The fame, if not the music, of Mr. Duddell's arc penetrated, it appears, to Vienna, where the experiments were repeated at the Technological Institute, and thence returned to the English lay Press. The Daily Mail of January 12 last contained an article on “Music in Flame,” the result of an interview with Prof. Ayrton on the subject of Mr. Duddell's experiments, in the course of which he suggested that it might be possible to utilise the discovery for the purpose of public entertainment. Would it not be possible, for example, to play a tune upon the arc lamps used in lighting a hall, the musician being at a distance—even outside the building—and playing on the ingenious key-board devised by Mr. Duddell? At the time this article appeared the prophecy may have seemed somewhat extravagant. Mr. Duddell's experiments were conducted, it will be remembered, by shunting an arc burning between solid carbons—the cored carbon arc has no music in its soul—by a circuit containing capacity and self-induction, and the note emitted by the arc was varied by altering the capacity or self-induction in the shunt circuit. The shunt circuit was, however, placed directly across the terminals of the arc, and there was no evidence of any possibility of playing tunes on the arc from any distance; and, further, the arc lamps used in the experiment were hand-fed and it was not unreasonable to suppose that the mechanism and magnet coils of an automatic arc lamp would effectually interfere with the music.
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Musical Arcs . Nature 63, 542–543 (1901). https://doi.org/10.1038/063542a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/063542a0