THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 |C5
“trickster,” “huckster” or
“prankster”), got attached to
“gang” by 1884. In that year, as
recorded by the Oxford English
Dictionary, the Cincinnati Com-
mercial Gazette scoffed at
Democratic presidential candi-
date Grover Cleveland by call-
ing him “a creature of a combi-
nation of gangsters and
cranks.” The urban hooligans
called “gangsters” at the time
were often linked to strong-
arm tactics in the service of
political machines.
As the Prohibition Era made
“gangsters” such as Al Capone
household names, the genre of
the “gangster film” also became
popular, thanks to movies like
“Little Caesar” in 1931 and
“Scarface” the following year.
Cinematic depictions of
gangsterism were often criti-
cized for glorifying outlaws—a
charge that would return de-
cades later in response to a new
pop-cultural wave, the rise of
“gangsta rap” in the late 1980s.
(“Gangsta” was popularized by
the N.W.A. song “Gangsta,
Gangsta” from their 1988 album
“Straight Outta Compton.”)
Now, a century after the ad-
vent of Prohibition, the contra-
band liquor trade is long forgot-
ten, but “gangster” remains a
potent label for lawlessness. WARNER BROS/EVERETT COLLECTIONAS A NEW GANGSTER FILM
from Martin Scorsese, “The
Irishman,” hits theaters this
week, the word “gangster”
seems to be cropping up every-
where.
“The Irishman” stars Robert
De Niro and Joe Pesci (both
alumni of previous Scorsesegangster dramas, “Goodfellas”
and “Casino”), with Mr. De
Niro as the titular hit man
Frank Sheeran, who was reput-
edly contracted to kill union
leader Jimmy Hoffa, played by
Al Pacino.
Making the media rounds in
advance of the film’s release, Mr.[Gangster]
HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
WORD ON
THE STREETBEN
ZIMMERREVIEW
wife Mary entered the spare bed-
room of her house and found an ap-
parent chimney sweep lying dead to
the world “on my nice white coun-
terpanes and pillow shams.”
On July 18, Edison wrote in a
technical note that there was “no
doubt that I shall be able to store
up and reproduce automatically at
any future time the human voice
perfectly.” When exactly, that sum-
mer, did all of Edison’s past work
on the sending and reception of
sound coalesce into the phono-
graph? The discovery was so sensa-
tional that legends began to accrete
around it almost at once, and his
own memories of the moment
swam confusedly.
Perhaps it was when he heard the
faint sound of his own voice reciting
the alphabet, when he retraced some
diagrammatic scratches he had
made on a strip of paraffined paper.
It might have been when he shouted
“Halloo! Halloo!” into the mouth-
piece and, pulling a strip of wax pa-
per intended to record waves
through a second time, heard as
from a distant cliff, “Halloo! Halloo!”
It may even have been the moment
when, absent-mindedly caressing a
needle as it vibrated, he felt a prick
on his thumb—a sonic wave inscrib-
ing itself in his own flesh.
“Kruesi—make this,” Edison re-
called saying to John Kruesi, his
Swiss-born master machinist, giving
him a drawing of a mounted, foil-
wrapped cylinder, with a handle on
one side to turn it, and a vibrant
mouthpiece projecting a stylus that
just touched the surface of the wrap.
“I told him I was going to record talk-
ing, and then have the machine talk
back,” Edison wrote. “He thought it
absurd. However, it was finished, the
foil was put on; I then shouted Mary
had a little lamb, etc. I adjusted the
reproducer, and the machine reproduced it per-
fectly....I never was so taken aback in my life.”
What awed Edison beyond any other thought
was that the moment did not have to be a moment;
it could be a century, if the foil and the stylus were
preserved; and then in 1977, if some unborn person
turned this same handle, the voice of a man long
dead would speak to him. No wonder that Kruesi,
listening with incredulity to the thing he had made
talking with Edison’s voice, exclaimed,“Mein Gott
im Himmel!”(My God in heaven).
All those who heard the miraculous machine in
the ensuing months, from the president of the U.S.
on down, reacted with equal disbelief. Since the
dawn of humanity, religions had asserted that the
human soul would live on after the body rotted
away. The human voice was a thing almost as in-
substantial as the soul, but it was a product of the
body and therefore must die too—in fact, did die,
evaporating like breath the moment each word,
each phoneme was sounded. Even the notes of in-
animate things—the tree falling in the wood, thun-
der rumbling, ice cracking—sounded once only, ex-
cept if they were duplicated in echoes that
themselves rapidly faded.
But here now were echoes made hard, resound-
ing as often as anyone wanted to hear them again.Mr. Morris, who died in May at the age of 78,
was the author of books including “The Rise of
Theodore Roosevelt,” “Dutch: A Memoir of Ron-
ald Reagan” and “Edison,” to be published by
Random House on Oct. 22, from which this es-
say is adapted.a hiss as the last key was depressed. It was hardly the text recorder
Butler had suggested, nor was it workable. Edison soon realized
that letters had little to do with phonetics. Instead, he had dreamed
up something truly radical: the notion of text transformed digitally
into sound.
By mid-June, Edison had been able to construct a combination
telephone transmitter-receiver that tested “far plainer and better
than Bell’s.” The normally phlegmatic Batchelor was so pleased with
it that he boasted to his brother, “We have just got our
‘speaking telegraph’ perfected.” That turned out not to
be the case, and the pace of round-the-clock experiments
increased to the point that a trade journal for telegraph
operators reported, “T.A. Edison is gray as a badger, and
rapidly growing old.”
Not until July 16 did Edison feel that he had a device
worth patenting. The application he signed that day
specified multiple timpani that “reproduced” vocal in-
flections and a sibilant-sensitive diaphragm. But a labo-
ratory visitor (spying for Bell) found the instrument
more powerful than clear, with the wordschismsounding
more likekim.
“We have had terrible hard work on the Speaking telegraph,”
Batchelor complained to his fellow inventor Ezra Gilliland. For the
past five to six weeks, he added, Edison’s team had been “frequently
working 2 nights together until we all had to knock off from want
of sleep.”
Indeed, Edison’s gray look may well have come from the ruboff of
carbon dust, graphite and other sooty conductors that besmirched
him as the summer progressed. After one of these adjournments, hisT
homas Alva Edison’s
self-proclaimed greatest
invention, the phono-
graph, won him over-
night fame. Journalists
would marvel that such an acoustic
revolution, adding a whole new di-
mension to human memory, could
have been accomplished by a man
half deaf in one ear and wholly deaf
in the other.
In February 1877, the same month
that saw Edison turn 30 and show
his first streaks of silver hair, he
and his fellow inventor Charles
Batchelor began a new series of ex-
periments on what they called, variously, the “telephonic telegraph,”
the “speaking telegraph” and the “talking telephone.” This confusion
of names would last as long as Americans took to adjust to the star-
tling notion that an electrically transmitted message did not neces-
sarily have to be transcribed.
It was beyond even Alexander Graham Bell’s imagination that
people might one day use the telephone just to chat. As far as Edi-
son was concerned, Bell’s invention was a device to speed up the
process of turning words into pulsations of current,
then turning the pulsations back into words at the other
end—words intended to be heard only by a receiving
operator, who would then (as Edison had done thou-
sands of times as a youth) copy out the message for de-
livery. Hence the telephone really was, for all its crackly
noise, telegraphic in function. What Edison was after
was a device that would accommodate the infinite gra-
dations of the human voice—even nonvocal breaths,
sighs, coughs and hesitations.
That May, Edison was in the midst of sketching some
devices for the capture of sibilants when Rep. Benjamin
Butler of Massachusetts challenged him to invent a tele-
phone recorder that would convert sound into text. Edison brooded
for a day or two, then came up with the opposite idea.
He drew what looked like a xylophone floating in space. The xy-
lophone bars turned out to be lettered keys, each ending in a tiny
metal wheel serrated to make or break signals in the high frequen-
cies. Edison apparently thought he could play the keys—once for
each unit of the alphabet—in such legato combinations thatT
would blend intoH, then into the vowelI, which would sharpen intoBYEDMUNDMORRISIn 1877, all of the great inventor’s past work on the sending and
reception of sound coalesced into the phonograph.‘I never
was so
taken
aback in
my life.’
THOMAS EDISONThe Making of
Thomas Edison’s
Miraculous Machine
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)
with an Edison Standard
Phonograph, 1906.De Niro has leveled the
“gangster” label at his
frequent political target:
Donald Trump. On “The
Graham Norton Show,”
he said of Mr. Trump,
“Today, we have a weird,
twisted president who
thinks he’s a gangster,
who’s not even a very
good gangster.” Minne-
sota Sen. Amy Klobuchar
tossed a similar barb in
a recent CNN interview,
saying, “You’ve got a
president that is acting
like a global gangster.”
All of this “gangster”
talk is oddly appropriate as
Americans commemorate the
hundredth anniversary of two
major historical events. In Octo-
ber 1919, in what became known
as the “Black Sox” scandal,
members of the Chicago White
Sox threw the World Series by
accepting money from gangsters
associated with Arnold Roth-
stein’s gambling syndicate. And
later that same month, Prohibi-
tion began with the passage of
the Volstead Act, ushering in an
era of illicit alcohol trade that
greatly increased the profiles of
gangsters from Al Capone on
down.
While Prohibition elevated
“gangster” into common par-lance, the
word has
much older
roots. The
word “gang”
goes back to Old Norse, where
“gangr” could refer either to a
journey or a group of people
traveling together. From the
“journey” or “passage” sense of
the word came “gangway” or
“gangplank” as a name for a
temporary passage to a ship.
The “group of fellow travel-
ers” meaning eventually was ex-
tended to any band of associates,
often with negative connotations
having to do with thievery or
other crimes. A highwayman
named James Hind, who fought
in the English Civil War for the
royalist cause of King Charles II,
was the subject of a colorful bio-
graphical tract in 1652 subtitled,
“With his Orders, Instructions,and Decree, to all his Royal
Gang, and Fraternity.”
In American use, the criminal
“gang” took on new shades of
meaning, often designating a
group of young delinquents stak-
ing a territorial claim in a city,
banding together with a particu-
lar name. The August 1857 issue
of Harper’s Magazine reported
that in New York City, “a gang of
thieves and desperadoes, known
as the ‘Dead Rabbits,’ made an
attack upon a few policemen on
duty near their haunts.”
The Dead Rabbits would be
memorialized in Herbert As-
bury’s 1927 book “The Gangs of
New York,” which in turn
served as the basis for a 2002
film of the same name directed
by Mr. Scorsese.
The “-ster” suffix, commonly
used for identifying people (of-
ten in a negative way, such asA scene from the
2013 movie ‘Gangster
Squad’ with
Sean Penn (left).Crime as
A Group
Activity,
Noworin
Old Norse