Margaret Watt Hughes

I have just started my day, well no I have deadlines coming out of my ears, so I have been working for hours and on a break saw my friend Jane Cabrera's stories which included (oh my word! how odd coincidences can be) the work of Margaret Watt Hughes (1842-1907).

 Margaret Watt Hughes 'Megan'  was a Welsh singer, songwriter, teacher, scientist  philanthropist and visualiser of sound, and yes the coincidence is paste paint. 

"I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing!. . . I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of the cloud across the sun’s disk!" Alexander Graham Bell to his father 1880

Alexander Graham Bell had been exploring the visual property of sound  using a device he called the Photophone. This device consisted of a mouthpiece attached to a chamber capped with a thin mirror. When spoken into, the mirror would vibrate, thereby modulating a beam of sunlight — effectively encoding it with the sound. This vibrating light beam was then picked up and turned back into sound by a mirrored parabolic receiver some distance away.  

Above and Below diagrams of the photophone.

Bell on his death bed believed this to be his most important invention.

Steven Connor noted that the communications landscape of the late nineteenth century was characterised by:

 “a kind of conversion mania, as inventors and engineers sought more and more ways in which different kinds of energy and sensory form could be translated into each other.”

Margaret Watts Hughes was the first  ever woman who dared to present an invention at the Royal Society of London. Her invention was the eidophone a tool to measure the power of voice. It consisted of a mouthpiece leading to a receiving chamber, over which was stretched a rubber membrane, or diaphragm, and was almost identical in most respects to the transmitter of Bell’s Photophone. 

She experimented with this device by sprinkling a variety of powders onto its surface, then singing into it to see how far these powders would leap. This activity would soon take an unexpected turn:

"I had been working on this path until May, 1885, when on one occasion as I sang I noticed that the seeds which I had placed on the India rubber membrane, on becoming quiescent, instead of scattering promiscuously in all directions and falling over the edge of the receiver onto the table, as was customary when a rather loud note was sung, resolved themselves into a perfect geometrical figure."

Megan's 'Voice Figures' were published in an article in 1891

Illustrations of these phenomena — which she termed Voice Figures — can be found in her first publication, an article in 'The Century' from 1891.  They were arranged in order of increasing complexity, the images display a clear hierarchy of forms, from the simple “primitive” and geometrical, to more complex figures that look more like floral shapes. 

Here, we can see the beginnings of Watts Hughes’ passion for the project; what began as a technique for measuring an aspect of vocal prowess  and became an exploration of visual forms created through the resonant interaction of voice, instrument, and materials. Having seen the patterns in sand and Lycopodium she wanted to trap these patterns and so started using water and milk and then glycerine, paste and even plaster of Paris. 

“the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe.”Margaret Watt Hughes