To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. — Thomas Edison
Phonoautograph Machine
I purchased the contents of Maxwell Goodspeed’s workshop including his diaries and plans for exotic machines he wished to build, one of which was a purported Thought Reading Machine.
The problem was that Goodspeed’s notes and plans were written in code which I had to somehow try to crack.
I enlisted my colleague, Lily, to help me with the task. Admittedly though, I had an ulterior motive—I was hoping by working with her we might develop a closer relationship as well.
But it seemed the closer I pressed to Lily, the more she rebuffed my romantic efforts. I hoped she wouldn’t back out of our arrangement altogether though.
But Lily was as good as her word, and that very afternoon we sat on the floor in my front room working on Goodspeed’s cipher, and continued to do so for the rest of the weekend—that was a consolation of sorts—to spend hours side by side with a goddess, even if she was dressed in jeans and ponytail and wearing canvas tennis shoes.
But I was feeling defeated as I drove Lily home on Sunday night. We had no luck in cracking the secret code, and my bad luck continued as she bolted from the SUV before I could walk her to the door.
I drove home weary and dejected.
Back in my front room, I flop down on the couch and stare morosely at Goodspeed’s notebooks spread out on the floor and Lily’s lamp and mirror that she rescued from Goodspeed’s shed forgotten by her and resting on the carpet.
Suddenly, I give a start and prop myself up on one elbow, so I can get a better look at the text reflected in the wavy glass of the mirror.
It’s apparent Goodspeed used mirror writing to conceal the text and as I look closely, I’m able to make out the odd Latin word. Fortunately I studied Latin in high school and then continued through undergrad courses in university.
My Latin is now a bit rusty, but with a good Latin dictionary, I figure I’ll be able to decipher the text.
I get my second wind and continue through the night until I’m able to decode both notebooks. What I learn seems too fantastic to be true.
I find out Goodspeed was encouraged by the work of a scientist named Julius Emmner. Emmner was fascinated by a device called a phonoautograph that showed what sound waves looked like on paper.
He theorized that if a machine could represent invisible sound waves, a machine could be constructed to read invisible thought waves.
Goodspeed was inspired by Emmner’s ideas and built a machine that supposedly could read thoughts, but according to the dates in his journal entries, he must have died before he could test it.
His amazing mind-reading machine remained stored in the dusty sheds along with his indecipherable notes—until Doris decided to rid herself of her great-grandfather’s ‘useless junk’.
Included in the notebooks was a diagram of the mind-reading machine Goodspeed built. I was confident I’d easily be able to reassemble the parts.
Over the next few days I was at the Goodspeed Lab classifying and sorting through his materials and arranging for a cartage company to transport the valuable pieces to my garage.
Goodspeed called his machine a psychometer. It was made of a glass, a mirror, and a galvanometer—a device used to measure electric charges—and the results of the readings were typed out using a modified antique stock ticker machine.
He included instructions detailing how it worked. Apparently, a subject placed his palms on the copper plates of the galvanometer while a light was beamed at him. The person was instructed to allow random thoughts to come to mind, and the machine measured the different responses of thought and emotion as it typed out the results on the stock ticker tape.
I guessed if Goodspeed thought they invented a machine in the mid 1800’s that could graph sound waves, why might he not invent a machine that could trap brain waves?
The notes also indicated Goodspeed was working on another device that would project thoughts as visible images and even display emotions in cloudy storms of colour.
The thought excited me and obsessed with the idea I plunged headlong into the work.
To be continued...
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