Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha
Page 25
DATE: 1877.
WHAT IT IS: The first machine in history to play back recorded sound.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The device consists of a grooved cylinder with a crank running through its center and two diaphragms with recording and playback needles at opposite sides of the cylinder. The mechanism is mounted on a metal base.
It was one of those fantastical contraptions that people through the centuries could only imagine. For instance, in his posthumously published 1657 novel, A Voyage to the Moon, the French writer Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac described a fictitious voyage to the moon and told how he came upon “a box—somewhat of metal … it was a book, indeed, but a strange and wonderful book … made wholly for the ears and not the eyes, so that when anybody has a mind to read in it, he winds up the machine with a great many little springs … and straight, as from the mouth of man or a musical instrument, proceed all the distinct and different sounds.”
Ah, the phonograph—translated from the Greek, the word means “sound writer”—the dream of countless generations. But how impossible it must have seemed!
A device that could grab sounds out of the air, preserve them, and then re-create them in all their varied and rich timbres, pitches, tones, textures, and nuances? A device that could, in essence, bring the past to life?
Today, the phonograph already represents outdated technology, but to those of long ago the idea of a machine that could capture and reproduce sounds seemed downright preposterous. And yet while the phonograph is one of those landmark human achievements that changed the landscape of everyday life forever, its discovery was actually made by accident.
It was while trying to make an improvement on the telegraph and telephone that Thomas Alva Edison stumbled on the idea for a phonograph. The telegraph was developed in the United States primarily as a means of communicating across the expanding nation, as pioneers and others moved out west during the first half of the nineteenth century. The telephone came along later, credited to Alexander Graham Bell after he spoke over a wire to his assistant Thomas Watson in March 1876.
When the telephone first came into use, it was thought that it would be used like the telegraph—that is, a person would go to an office and give a message to an operator, who would then make a connection to a remote line and speak into the phone; the message would be transmitted to an operator at the other end, who would in turn take down the message and deliver it to its intended recipient.
In Edison’s day, inventors were constantly looking for ways to store telegraph and telephone messages so that they could be played back and delivered to the recipient at a later time. In the course of trying to build a device that could record telegraph and telephone messages, Edison observed that when a telegraph stylus read inscriptions by moving very rapidly over paper, “light, musical, rhythmical sound,” resembling indistinct human talk, seemed to emanate from the telegraph. Knowing that in the telephone a diaphragm’s vibrations are converted into electricity and then back to sound so they may be heard, Edison thought that by placing a stylus over a lead-based surface, he could record vibrations as impressions that could be changed back to their original sound. From this idea, Edison realized that a talking machine was a possibility.
Even at this stage, Edison’s utilitarian vision for the talking machine was as a device that could record telephone messages. The telephone was a recent invention that only the rich could afford; if he could invent a talking machine, anybody could record a message that could be transmitted from a telephone in one office to another, where the recipient could listen to the message.
It was during the second half of 1877 that Edison began his scientific investigation and conducted experiments to build a workable prototype. On July 18 he conducted an experiment and sketched on paper illustrations of a person conveying air through a telephone tube, the wind sounds and hisses producing vibrations that resulted in a diaphragm powerfully vibrating. The experiment apparently promoted his confidence and excitement; Edison concluded, “Just tried experiment with a diaphram having an embossing point & held against parafin paper moving rapidly the spkg vibrations are indented nicely & theres no doubt that I shall be able to store up & reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly.”
The next day Edison provided some technical explanation for his work in a British patent document for a sound telegraph:
The vibrations of the atmosphere, which result from the human voice or from any musical instrument or otherwise, are made to act in increasing or lessening the electric force upon a line by opening or closing the circuit, or increasing or lessening the intimacy of contact between conducting surfaces placed in the circuit at the receiving station; the electric action in one or more electro magnets causes a vibration in a tympan, or other instrument similar to a drum, and produces a sound, but this sound is greatly augmented by mechanical action. I have discovered that the friction of a point or surface that is in contact with a properly prepared and slowly moving surface, is very much increased or lessened by the strength of the electric wave passing at such point of contact, and from this variation in the friction a greater or less vibration is given to the mechanism or means that produce or develope the sound at the receiving station, thereby rendering clear and distinct the sound received that otherwise would not be audible.
Over the next few months Edison continued to give thought to transmitting sound vibrations via diaphragms, but he wasn’t the only one to endeavor to create a recording-and-playing device. In October 1877, an article appeared in a French publication that told about a conception of Charles Cros, a dabbler in scientific inventions. Advancing on the work of E. L. Scott de Martinville, who some twenty years earlier had developed a contraption that made indentations corresponding to sound vibrations, Cros had the previous April written a treatise about a procedure in which inscriptions were made on a flat lampblacked glass that was caused to vibrate, the inscriptions then being used to reproduce the vibrations and recreate the sounds originally reproduced. Cros’s idea for a phonograph was similar to Edison’s, but unlike Edison he was unable to build a working prototype.
Thomas Edison's sketch, dated November 29, 1877, for his original tinfoil phonograph, Edison had his associates, Charles Batchelor and John Kruesi, sign the sketch for patent protection.
On November 29, Edison sketched a diagram of his conception for a phonograph and turned it over to one of his assistants, John Kruesi, to build. Sometime during the first week of December 1877, Kruesi, apparently under his boss’s watchful eye, built the mechanism in accordance with the diagram. Edison immediately tried it out. At this phase of his life—often considered his creative peak— he worked out of a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. In what was to become a legendary story about the invention of the phonograph, Edison began his immortal experiment by shouting into a recording horn, “Mary had a little lamb / its fleece was white as snow / and everywhere that Mary went / the lamb was sure to go.”
As Edison spoke into the horn, he turned a crank, setting the mechanism in motion. The airwaves of his voice caused a recording needle to move and make indentations on a piece of tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder. After he finished speaking, Edison turned the crank in the opposite direction, which rewound the cylinder and brought the tinfoil back to its starting point. The recording needle was then reset down on the tinfoil, the crank turned again—and this time the sound of Edison reciting the well-known nursery rhyme was heard coming out of the recording horn. Voila! This demonstration marked the first time sound had ever been preserved and re-created, and history had just been made!*
Edison wasted little time in revealing his remarkable achievement to the world. On December 7, with a couple of his assistants in tow, he offered a public demonstration of his new talking machine at the New York City office of Scientific American magazine. On the same day Edison’s assistant Charles Batchelor wrote the following letter to the editor of English Mechanic, announcing and explaining his boss’s new invention:
A sheet of tinfoil is made to move in front of a diaphragm provided with an embossing point in its centre, at a uniform speed. When the diaphragm is vibrated by the human voice the ever varying rate of vibration is accurately recorded by indents in the tinfoil; this indented sheet is made to move at the same speed in front of, and in contact with, a delicate spring which is connected to another diaphragm and to which it transmits the same rates of vibrations under the same conditions and in consequence gives forth the same sounds as those spoken in the first place. It has been exhibited for the last few days in New York and has excited the admiration of many scientific men.
Also on the same day Edward Johnson, a Menlo Park employee, sent Edison’s Washington, D.C. business associate, Uriah Painter, a brief but cogent telegram: “Phonograph Delivered to me today. Complete success. Talks plainer than telephone. …”
With his invention now realized, and excitement about it beginning to spread feverishly, Edison set out to profit from it. In 1878 he licensed the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company to exploit the new machine. In these Victorian times, public lectures were a popular form of entertainment, and the phonograph was set on a path to become a kind of stage performer in its own right. The company manufactured hundreds of machines and dispatched trained demonstrators to travel around to theaters, country fairs, and other venues and entertain audiences with the talking machine that could reproduce sounds. Onstage people would whistle, play musical instruments, deliver speeches, recite poems, sing songs, all while the newfangled machine, with a fresh piece of tinfoil, captured the sounds. Then the demonstrator would crank the cylinder and, to the audience’s delight, play back the sounds just heard. Crowds flocked to hear the new talking machine. The demonstrators kept a percentage of the gate, forwarding the rest of the receipts to the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, which in turn remitted a portion to the inventor.
But public interest in the phonograph faded as the novelty wore off. Although an enthusiastic Edison predicted his “baby” would be an important medium for making music and literature available and would also be useful as a dictating machine, it had no practical application at the time. The sound it produced was harsh, sibilants were missing, and the tinfoil sheet lasted no more than a handful of plays. Edison’s machine seemed to have much potential, but it just wasn’t ready for the commercial marketplace. While Edison’s attention would be diverted by his work on an incandescent lamp, others sought to realize the phonograph’s potential.
In 1880 Alexander Graham Bell hired technicians to improve on Edison’s phonograph, and in 1885 he had several applications for a machine that was somewhat different, replacing Edison’s tinfoil cylinder with a machine that used a wax-coated cardboard tube. This machine became known as a “graphophone.”
Edison renewed his attention to the phonograph around 1886, and developed his own wax cylinder. The inventor continued to refine his improvement as others—such as Ezra Gilliland, who developed an electrical machine to play the cylinders—endeavored to make the phonograph commercially viable. Soon an investor purchased several companies in the field, including Edison’s, for the purpose of making and selling dictating machines.
Still, neither the phonograph nor the graphophone could gain a foothold in the commercial world. Machines installed in offices performed erratically, and the parts were not interchangeable. Perhaps the greatest reason for their defeat was the enormous resistance of office stenographers (almost all men in those days), who feared technological displacement! The neophyte sound-recording industry appeared doomed, although other entrepreneurs would not be discouraged. Recognizing the vast potential of the talking machine, they not only made further technological improvements but envisioned other commercial applications for it as well.
Using Thomas Edison's drawing as a blueprint, John Kruesi constructed the first workable tinfoil phonograph, pictured above.
In 1890 an enterprising businessman changed the destiny of the crippled phonograph business. Louis Glass installed a battery-powered model of Edison’s phonograph in the Palais Royal saloon in San Francisco. The machine had several listening tubes, and patrons paid a nickel to open up a tube. The machines—each with four sets of tubes—could earn twenty cents a play. Glass’s idea caught on, and there were eager lines waiting to deposit a nickel.
Entrepreneurs across the nation began installing the machines, grouping several of them at one location, and thus was born the “phonograph parlor.” What people wanted to hear most were vaudeville and musical comedy songs, band arrangements of marches and concert pieces, comic monologues, and virtuoso whistling solos.
Improvements in recordings were constantly being made. Emile Berliner, a German immigrant, developed a flat disc and in 1901 formed with Eldridge Johnson the Victor Talking Machine Company, issuing recordings of Russian stars on its “red label” for five dollars each. The year 1906 marked the introduction of the Victrola, the first record player to incorporate the reproducing horn into the body of the player (thus eliminating the external horn, which had been a dust-gathering eyesore for housewives). Soon the two-sided record came along, and records became the most popular form of home entertainment. In 1927 the Automatic Music Company began manufacturing coin-operated record players that could play many selections. These machines came to be called jukeboxes. The 1933 repeal of Prohibition sparked the opening of thousands of nightclubs and bars, almost all equipped with jukeboxes, which stimulated millions of record sales and saved the record industry. Musical artists such as Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and the Mills Brothers developed cult followings via jukeboxes.
From 1946 to 1958, the record industry grew further, technologically and economically. Magnetic tape was introduced as a recording medium, facilitating the recording process when mistakes were made. In 1948 the Columbia Record Company introduced the twelve-inch long-playing record (LP) with a playing time of up to twenty-three minutes on each side, and in 1949 RCA offered a seven-inch vinyl record playable at 45 revolutions per minute. Each company produced turntables with speeds designed to play its records.
It was probably the development of the LP and the 45 that saved the phonograph industry from the competition of another new home entertainment industry around this time—television. As people bought TV sets, both the radio and recording industries suffered. Because radio could no longer afford live entertainment, it had to program records in a format to be played by disc jockeys. Ironically, not only did radio begin to prosper again, but it aided the record industry by playing (or promoting) its records.
In 1958, stereo recordings were introduced, but it was almost ten years before enough consumers had acquired compatible playback equipment that the old mono recordings could be phased out.
In the mid- to late 1960s, cassette and eight-track recordings caught on with the public, and in the early 1970s quadrophonic (“surround”) sound was introduced. Video discs and CDs soon followed, the latter eventually becoming enormously popular. New and improved technologies will undoubtedly continue to be introduced for the singular purpose of enhancing the pleasure of listening to music.
Thomas Edison’s original tinfoil phonograph is a surviving piece of history, the progenitor of a new technology that launched the sound-recording age. All that has followed, from later phonographs to cassettes to today’s compact discs, and all that will follow as new technologies are developed, are descendants of the device that Edison created to demonstrate that sound could be preserved and reproduced. In retrospect, the invention by the Wizard of Menlo Park seems inevitable, the product of thousands of years of human progress. But the debt to Edison’s genius is immense, for with his technology, humankind has been able to record for posterity the sounds of life.
LOCATION: Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, New Jersey.
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bsp; Footnote
*The recording horn and tinfoil used in this famous trial are not known to exist anymore, the latter doubtless discarded as trash.
JESSE JAMES’S STICKPIN
DATE: 1882.
WHAT IT IS: An ornamental pin, used like a tiepin, that was owned by the nineteenth-century outlaw.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The stickpin now exists in separate pieces—a small diamond-shaped stone measuring less than one-quarter inch across made of black obsidian, or volcanic glass, which has a small piece of its original brass mounting on one side; and pieces of the pin, each less than a quarter-inch long.
Jesse James dreamed up many crazy schemes, but never could the notorious bandit of the Old West have imagined that the commonplace stickpin he inserted through his cravat on the last day of his life would resurface more than a century later to help settle a long-standing dispute about whether his alleged remains were actually his.
In 1881, the year before he died, Jesse James had a price on his head. The Wanted posters blared in large bold print: “Proclamation of the Governor of Missouri! Rewards for the Arrest of Express and Train Robbers,” and then in fine print offered a reward of $5,000 for the arrest and conviction of each person who had participated in the train robberies near Glendale in Jackson County on October 8, 1879, and near Winston in Daviess County on July 15, 1881. But Jesse and his brother Frank were set apart from the rest of their gang. While the proclamation offered the reward “for the arrest and conviction” of unnamed parties, in the closing paragraphs Jesse and Frank were specifically named, along with a reward of $10,000 “for the arrest and delivery” of “each or either of them to the sheriff of Daviess County.” Governor Thomas T. Crittenden set the higher bounty for the James brothers because one of the train robberies wasn’t just a robbery. In the Daviess County holdup, the conductor, William Westfall, and a train company employee, John McCulloch, were murdered, in the same county where Jesse and Frank had already been indicted for the murder of John W. Sheets.