,
by
Luther Trant, on the rainy morning of April 13th, sat alone in his office. On his wrist, as he bent closely over a heap of typewritten pages spread before him on his desk, a small instrument in continual motion ticked like a watch. It was for him an hour of idleness; he was reading fiction. And with his passion for making visible and recording the workings of the mind, he was taking a permanent record of his feelings as he read.
The instrument strapped on Trant’s arm was called a sphygmograph. It carried a small steel rod which pressed tightly on his wrist artery. This rod, rising and falling with each rush of the blood wave through the artery, transmitted its motion to a system of small levers. These levers operated a stylus point, which touched the surface of a revolving drum. An
