Letters

Vol. 48 No. 19 · 22 October 2026

A Fly’s Footfall

David Trotter tells the story of David Edward Hughes’s demonstration of his microphone at the Royal Society in 1878 (LRB, 24 September). Hughes claimed that it rendered ‘audible sounds which have hitherto been inaudible’. The following year it did so to even more remarkable effect. Working at home at 40 Langham Street, Hughes found that the sparks across a gap in a circuit on his bench were registered as clicks in a telephone receiver and microphone unit nearby, though the circuit and unit were not connected by a wire. He attached the circuit to a clockwork mechanism that caused it to spark repeatedly, then carried the receiver out into Great Portland Street and walked up and down with it clamped to his ear – the first Londoner to cross a pavement in that now familiar posture. The clicks sounded for sixty yards before they faded; in subsequent attempts, they could be heard as far as five hundred yards away.

He was listening to radio, nine years before Hertz proved it existed. In February 1880 Hughes demonstrated the effect to visitors from the Royal Society, Thomas Huxley and George Stokes among them. Stokes pronounced that the effect was caused by electromagnetic induction, a colourable explanation; Hughes, a music teacher by training in a room full of physicists, accepted the verdict and published nothing. The story surfaced nineteen years later in a letter to the editor of the Electrician in which Hughes allowed, with some grace, that Hertz’s experiments were ‘far more conclusive than mine’.

David Woodard Tampere, Finland

The word ‘microphone’ has been the ‘standard term for a certain kind of auditory device since at least 1684’, David Trotter writes. We can go even further back. Perhaps the first microphone to have been imagined (if not constructed) can be found in a now forgotten academic comedy, Albumazar by Thomas Tomkis, performed at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1614. The device is named an Otacousticon, and described as a ‘receiver of sounds, as spectacles like eyes for sight’. It turns out to be no more than ‘a paire of Asses eares, and large ones’, fixed (presumably) on top of the user’s head.

But fifty or so years later the Otacousticon had become a reality. In April 1668, Samuel Pepys, who delighted in gadgets of all kinds, recorded listening to an Otacousticon at a meeting of the Royal Society. The instrument was ‘a great glass bottle broke at the bottom’, with the help of which Pepys was able to ‘plainly hear the dashing of the oars of the boats in the Thames … which, without it, I could not in the least do’. The Otacousticon is the distant progenitor of those large parabolic concrete acoustic mirrors set up along the English south coast in the 1930s to give early warning of incoming Dorniers and Heinkels – a technology then made redundant by the invention of radar.

To capture the sound of a squirrel’s heartbeat or a fly’s footfall was part of that rage for extending the human sensorium, the prospect of which bedazzled the savants of the Royal Society in the later 17th century. But such a radical prosthetic adjustment of our senses might have unforeseen consequences, as Alexander Pope predicted in his Essay on Man (1733). ‘Why has not man a microscopic eye?’ Pope demanded, satirically, before supplying the answer: ‘For this plain reason, man is not a fly.’ A human being whose sense of touch had been artificially amplified might find themselves ‘tremblingly alive all o’er’, constrained to ‘smart and agonise at every pore’. Worse still, if our sense of smell were similarly enhanced, so that ‘quick effluvia darting through the brain’ would result in death by the scent of a rose ‘in aromatic pain’. As for hearing, the sound of nature ‘thunder[ing] in his opening ears’ might leave the supplemented listener yearning for the quieter sounds of the ‘whispering zephyr, and the purling rill’.

In Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), Freud argued that with the help of artificial ‘auxiliary organs’, which included spectacles, the telescope and the microscope, the camera, the gramophone, the telephone and even writing itself, ‘man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.’ But despite all these Daedalian technological improvements, he suggested, ‘man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.’ Today, in the face of such ‘improvements’ as generative AI and large language models, these warnings from the past have lost none of their resonance.

Jonathan Sawday Saint Louis University, Missouri

Big Englanders

Ferdinand Mount describes the influx to England of German Protestant refugees from the Rhineland Palatinate in 1709 and the way they were ‘shovelled off’ to New York and Ireland (LRB, 24 September). Though, as he says, most of those sent to Ireland soon returned, there were exceptions, principally the ‘Palatines’ who had been settled south-west of Limerick by Sir Thomas Southwell. He saw this as a golden opportunity to expel papists from his lands and replace them with hardworking Protestants. Southwell’s efforts paid off: his Palatine enclave thrived, forming a prosperous and – thanks to marrying in – purely Protestant colony.

In the mid-19th century my Palatine Irish ancestors moved on again, by choice this time, to Canada. In 1964, a student in Europe for the first time, I decided to visit the small town of Rathkeale, where my family had come from. Hitchhiking from Limerick was frustrating, as there were so few cars on the roads in that part of Ireland back then. But finally a large black American-made car rolled to a stop. The driver was a Catholic priest. I mentioned that I was there to see where my ancestors had lived. He was immediately alert. ‘Oh, that’s fine. And what would your name be?’ ‘Sparling.’ Pause. ‘Ah, those are Palatines.’ Pause. ‘But there aren’t many of them left around here anymore.’ Pause. ‘And most of them who are here now are Catholics.’ I sensed an unspoken hope that given another 250 years or so they would all be Catholics.

Though Benjamin Franklin disparaged the ‘Palatine boors’, they had the last laugh. It was immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies from Southwell’s lands later in the 18th century who founded Methodism in what is now the United States and later, as loyalists fleeing the new republic, in Canada as well.

Don Sparling Brno, Czech Republic

Ferdinand Mount describes the ‘killing of the entire Jewish population of York in 1190’ as ‘a freelance effort, although there were rumours that Richard I was behind it’. In fact, at the time of the massacres in 1190 Richard and his chancellor were in Normandy on the way to the Third Crusade. Richard had expressly issued protections for the Jews during his absence, and was furious when he heard of the massacres, not for humanitarian reasons but because it meant that his royal authority had been challenged. The massacres also cost him the taxes the Jews paid, as well as access to their loans (usury being forbidden to Christians). Hostility to Jews was common across medieval Europe, but rulers often gave them protection for these practical reasons.

Peter Purton Southall, Middlesex

Ferdinand Mount quotes J.B. Priestley’s wish to be called a ‘Little Englander’ as an example of English self-deception. To be fair to Priestley, his contrasting ‘Big Englanders’ (‘red-faced, staring, loud-voiced fellows, wanting to go and boss everybody about all over the world, and being surprised and pained and saying “Bad show!” if some blighters refused to fag for them’) suggest that he had no illusions about English ‘gentleness’.

John Baxendale Sheffield

Air of Another Planet

Laura Tunbridge mentions Arnold Schoenberg’s interest in cinema (LRB, 24 September). The actress Salka Viertel, in her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers (1969), tells an anecdote about his brush with Hollywood. As an Austrian immigrant, long-time resident of Southern California and Hollywood familiar, Viertel was ideally placed to assist German refugees. So when Irving Thalberg, the ‘Boy Wonder’, heard a radio performance of Verklärte Nacht, he had his people contact her to arrange a meeting with Schoenberg.

At the meeting, Thalberg explained ‘why he wanted a great composer for the scoring of The Good Earth’. He was in the middle of paying his guest a compliment – ‘Last Sunday when I heard the lovely music you have written’ – when Schoenberg interrupted sharply: ‘I don’t write “lovely music”.’ He thought film music was terrible, he said, as was all the sound in film. If he were involved, he would need to have complete control over the sound, with the actors speaking analogously to the singer’s part in Pierrot Lunaire, ‘but, of course, less difficult’. At his request, Viertel demonstrated a bit of that work’s vocal part for Thalberg (her brother had performed in the premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, which she attended). He didn’t get the gig.

Larry Koenigsberg Eugene, Oregon

Demokratia

In her careful review of my book Polis, Rosalind Thomas reminds us that Hellenistic poleis had to deal with powerful empires externally and with rich citizens internally (LRB, 24 September). Is the notion that the Hellenistic polis enjoyed autonomy and democracy therefore untenable, as she contends? I argue that Hellenistic poleis strove to create spaces for autonomy, partly because this helped avoid the emergence of oligarchs backed by external superpowers. Hence in the Hellenistic age demokratia means popular sovereignty both external and internal. As for elite benefaction, I interpret it as a symptom of democracy – as the tip of an iceberg of taxation and services levied on the rich by democratic communities. This might be a rosy-eyed view, as our current low, dishonest decade suggests. Should the present age of oligarchical tendencies make us doubt the workings of local freedoms and democracy in a distant past? Or should a record of actually existing poleis demokratoumenai (self-governing states) tell us something about possibilities in the present? This is one of the reasons looking at the story of the polis beyond the classical age and Athenian democracy is so interesting. But perhaps local autonomy and democracy were traps, insidious ways for empire and oligarchy to exert power? I grapple with this sobering possibility throughout the book.

John Ma Columbia University, New York

Keep off the grass

Susan Pedersen mentions the rule at Trinity College, Cambridge, specifying ‘patches of grass … on which only fellows can walk’ (LRB, 24 September). Pembroke College, which I joined as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, had a similar rule, excluding all but college fellows from the lawn in Old Court. One day a group of us entered the college to find one of the senior porters – a formidable character known to be a stickler for college punctilio – chasing a number of ducks round the quadrangle in a vain attempt to shoo them away. We argued that the ducks were doing no harm, and that they should be permitted to wander. His response was terse and invited no rejoinder: ‘Sir, they walk on the bleedin’ grass.’

Fred Clough Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear

Susan Pedersen writes about the culture of Oxbridge in the decades after the Second World War. I recall hearing the late William Thomas, historian at Christ Church, reminiscing about his time with Hugh Trevor-Roper in the 1950s. He had asked what might be done about the young, bright, leftist historians such as Stuart Hall and Raphael Samuel coming up in the university. Trevor-Roper advised simply: ‘Mark them down, mark them down.’

Peter Rhoades Christ Church, Oxford

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