Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Sumner Tainter
invented the device in 1880. Bell regarded it as his "greatest
achievement," more important even than the telephone, and had
to be dissuaded from naming his second daughter Photophone.
His invention worked much like a telephone but transmitted
sounds over a beam of light rather than a copper wire. At the
end of a speaking tube, a mirror made of thin flexible
material responded to the variations in air pressure produced
by the sound waves of the speaker's voice, becoming
alternately concave and convex. These motions created
corresponding pulses in the brightness of a beam of light
reflected off the other side of the mirror. On the receiving
end, a parabolic mirror focused the beam of light onto a
photoreceptor, where its pulses were converted back into sound
waves. The invention soon was made electronic, with
electromagnetic earphones like those used in the telephone,
but in its first iteration no electricity was involved: the
device was fully photoacoustic.
Bell and Tainter successfully tested their photophone in
three experiments in 1880. In the last and most ambitious of
these, they achieved wireless communication between two
rooftops about 700 feet (213 meters) apart in Washington,
D.C., sending signals between them on a beam of reflected
sunlight. The solar source of light for the device (Edison's
development of commercially viable incandescent bulbs was
happening at exactly the same time, so sunlight was the only
powerful source available) did not, it seems, lead anyone to
call it a "sunphone," but similar names were proposed.
The French scientist Ernest Mercadier, another inventor of
incandescent light bulbs, persuaded Bell for a while to use
the term "radiophone" because the device's mirrors relied on
the sun's radiant energy.
By 1904 telephones had gradually started to appear in cities
(Ulysses mentions them in five chapters), and Marconi's
radios were proving capable of transmitting signals over
considerable distances, but the photophone was not a feature
of everyday life. From 1901 to 1904 a German scientist named
Ernst Ruhmer conducted a series of experiments that extended
the device's range to several miles, using naval searchlights
in some models to show that the technology could work even at
night. The British navy, and other European armed forces,
continued to develop and adopt photophones for several decades
afterwards, so Joyce might well have heard reports of the
device's potential when he began writing Circe in
1920.
It is possible that none of this technology lies behind
Joyce's reference to a sunphone, because Thomas Jefferson
Shelton popularized that word in the 1910s and 20s as an
aspect of his cosmic vibrations. As Harald Beck and John
Simpson note on a JJON page, the Miami Herald
reported on 27 September 1916 that "T. J. Shelton
advertises Sunphone and Sunsense, which ‘leads you into real
and genuine telepathy so that you can talk to God, your
neighbor, and yourself’. ‘Sunphone and Sunsense’, he
says, is dictated by himself the way he thinks it ought to be
written and taken down by his wife the way she thinks it ought
to be written, thus giving the product of both brains and
leaving the last word where it belongs both in new and old
thought." On 15 October 1921 the Oakland Tribune
advertised "Sunphone Sermons By T. J. Shelton, Preacher
Writer Teacher" in the Hotel Oakland.
Given Joyce's prodigious propensity for layering multiple
signifying contexts on top of one another, however, it makes
sense to consider that he may be alluding both to Shelton and
to the technological device. Indeed, it seems quite likely
that reports of the revolutionary technology inspired Shelton
to dream up a new catchy, lucrative label for marketing his
telepathic gifts. Nothing in Beck and Simpson's reporting
indicates that he treated the sunphone idea as anything other
than a vague metaphor for instantaneous spiritual
communication. In Joyce's hands, though, the telepathy
involves telephony: Elijah operates a "trunk line" and
offers his subscribers "the cutest snappiest line out."
Following him, one can "Book through to eternity junction."
The associative logic strongly recalls Stephen's thoughts in Proteus,
where umbilical cords become telephone lines connecting mystic
monks to the realm of divinity: "The cords of all link back,
strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks.
Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello! Kinch here.
Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one."
If Elijah's words do mockingly combine a huckster's
metaphysics with groundbreaking scientific technology, it
would not be the first time that Joyce made such a seemingly
bizarre connection. Far from seconding Baudelaire's
suspicion that science and metaphysics are antithetical
principles, Joyce repeatedly suggests that the burgeoning
discoveries and inventions of the Victorian era promise to
enlarge perception, understanding, and even emotional and
spiritual experience. Elijah's words about vibrations and
sunphones are bracketed by sounds of a gramophone
singing "Jerusalem! Open your gates and sing Hosanna" and at
the end of his spiel he joins in. In Hades Bloom
thinks of the potential for gramophones and photographs to
keep memories of the departed alive, and of putting telephones
in coffins in case they wake up. The stereoscope
becomes a fulcrum on which Stephen can toggle back and forth
between ordinary perception and spiritual revelation. Parallax,
based on the same optical principles, suggests the benefits of
viewing one's experiences from multiple angles.
