Edison

by Edmund Morris

  I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted Mary had a little lamb, etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I never was so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked for the first time….But here was something that there was no doubt of.145

  The “reproducer” was simply the mouthpiece assembly going back over its tracks and throwing back into the air the same waves of nursery rhyme that, a moment before, had gone into it. What awed Edison beyond any other thought was that the moment did not have to be a moment; it could be a century, if the foil and the stylus were preserved; and then in 1977, if some unborn person turned this same handle, the voice of a man long dead would speak to him. No wonder Kruesi, listening with incredulity to the thing he had made talking with Edison’s voice, exclaimed, “Mein Gott im Himmel!”146

  All those who heard the miraculous machine in the ensuing months, from the president of the United States on down, reacted with equal disbelief. Since the dawn of humanity, religions had asserted without proof that the human soul would live on after the body rotted away. The human voice was a thing almost as insubstantial as the soul, but it was a product of the body and therefore must die too—in fact, did die, evaporating like breath the moment each word, each phoneme was sounded. For that matter, even the notes of inanimate things—the tree falling in the wood, thunder rumbling, ice cracking—sounded once only, except if they were duplicated in echoes that themselves rapidly faded.

  But here now were echoes made hard, resounding as often as anyone wanted to hear them again. Breath had been turned into metal, metal was convertible back into air. It was a form of resurrection harder to credit (since faith was unnecessary) than that of Jesus Christ, which may have been why the most eloquent of the talking machine’s early witnesses was an Anglican priest, the Rev. Horatio N. Powers. He not only wrote but spoke into an Edison cylinder the first poem ever written for acoustic preservation. It was entitled “The Phonograph’s Salutation.”

  I seize the palpitating air. I hoard

  Music and speech. All lips that breathe are mine.

  I speak, and the inviolable word

  Authenticates its origin and sign….

  In me are souls embalmed. I am an ear

  Flawless as truth, and truth’s own tongue am I.

  I am a resurrection; men may hear

  The quick and the dead converse, as I reply.147

  IT WOULD GIVE US THE SPEECH

  When poetry and myth are correlated with more factual records of Edison’s invention of the phonograph (a name he gave it himself, based on the Greek particles for “sound” and “inscription”), they are not wholly disproved. Something extraordinary happened between his application for a new telephone patent on 16 July and his confident prediction, forty-eight hours later, that he would soon be able “to store up and reproduce” the human voice at will.148

  Around daybreak on the seventeenth, amid a swirl of acoustic drawings and consonant-laden phrases—Hemidemisemiquaver, Protochloride, The majestical myth which Physicists seek—he wrote in his notebook, “Glorious = Telephone perfected this morning 5 am = articulation perfect got ¼ column newspaper every word. had ricketty transmitter at that.” Clearly an epiphany of sorts had occurred. His note said nothing about playing back the sounds he had heard.149 But on a fragment of the same date he sketched both his telephone and his translating embosser and wrote the scattered words reproduced, indenting, and needle. The embosser was shown as a spiral platen with two tonearms, and the telephone had a strange device attached that might be a wheel, but on the other hand might not: if a wheel, why were two points stroking its circumference—one from the receiver and the other from what was clearly a reproducing diaphragm? The note’s purpose became even clearer if the stroked outline was seen as the side view of a cylinder. Here was Edison (signing his name above, with Batchelor and Adams below as witnesses) thinking in terms of sending sound, receiving sound, inscribing sound, and playing sound back—all in one connected sequence.150

  Supplementary testimony as to his moment of epiphany was supplied later by Charles Batchelor, a matter-of-fact man not given to Edisonian flights of fancy.

  The first experiment, as I remember it, was made in this way: Mr. Edison had a telephone diaphragm mounted in a mouthpiece of rubber in his hand, and he was sounding notes in front of it and feeling the vibration of the center of the diaphragm with his finger. After amusing himself with this for some time, he turned round to me and said, “Batch, if we had a point on this, we could make a record on some material which we could afterwards pull under the point, and it would give us the speech back.” I said, “Well, we can try it in a very few minutes,” and I had a point put on the diaphragm in the center….We got some of the old automatic telegraph paper, coated it over with wax, and I pulled it through the groove, while Mr. Edison talked to it. On pulling the paper through the second time, we both of us recognized we had recorded the speech. We made quite a number of modifications of this the same night, and Mr. Edison immediately designed a machine which would be better adapted for giving us better talking.151

  Just how “immediately” that design ensued, neither man could be sure. For ninety-one years another signed document was taken as proof that Thomas Edison saw the phonograph whole, in three dimensions, on 12 August 1877. It was his order to Kruesi to “make this”:152

  Edison’s sketch of his first phonograph, circa November 1877.

  Not until 1968 was it discovered that while the drawing may have been original, the inscription was of much later date, scrawled by Edison to please a publicist when he was too old to recall, or care, just when the model was built. But he did file a provisional British patent specification on 30 July, to confirm as discreetly as possible that he had been able “to make a record of the atmospheric sound waves” of human speech. He might have followed up at once with construction of a model in proof—except that the articulation he was getting from handheld diaphragms and strips of paraffin paper did not yet suggest any practical mechanics. Before there was a model, there had to be a design. It would take all that summer and much of the fall for Edison’s mental pairings of waves and grooves, disks and buttons, drums and cylinders, point and pen, and script and sound to merge into an instrument that talked just as he talked, and remembered better.153

  THE ILLUSION OF REAL PRESENCE

  The prototype phonograph he received from Kruesi at the beginning of December was as simple and solidly built as a railway coupler. It consisted of a small brass cylinder, spirally engrooved, with an axle and turning handle cut at the same pitch, so that the advance of the needle (recording or reproducing) from left to right was identical with that of the cylinder. A sleeve of tough, yet indentable tinfoil was clamped on for every fresh recording, and the diaphragm units were toggled so only one vibrated at a time.

  After much experimenting with needle design, a rounded rather than chisel point was found to press the foil into the groove more gently, and hence more faithfully, responsive to the vibrations of the diaphragm above. Edison’s original stylus had been so sharp that when he recited “Mary had a little lamb” into the mouthpiece, all Batchelor heard was ary ad ell am—“Something that was not fine talking, but the shape of it was there…we all let out a yell of satisfaction and a ‘Golly it’s there!!’ and shook hands all round.”154

  Now, with the cylinder turning steadily and the reproducer riding smoothly in its groove, there was no mistaking Mary or the dimensions of her lamb, and every sibilant in “its fleece was white as snow” sounded clear. By the end of November, Edison was ready to demonstrate his “talking machine” to the world.

  Thanks to the evangelism of Edward Johnson, who had appointed himself a roving huckster for Menlo Park
products, word had gotten around that a young engineer in New Jersey had invented a “recording telephone.”155 But the difficulty most professionals had in believing such a story had prevented it from becoming news. Edison decided to let the machine announce itself.

  On 8 December Scientific American went to press with the biggest scoop in its history.

  THE TALKING PHONOGRAPH

  Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine enquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night. These remarks were not only perfectly audible to ourselves, but to a dozen or more persons gathered around, and they were produced by the aid of no other mechanism than the simple little contrivance explained and illustrated below.156

  There followed a technical drawing that needed only four indicative letters to show A, the comfortably curving rubber mouthpiece, B, the cylinder on its shaft, C, the crank handle, and D, the reproducing speaker. Indentations in the foil wrap could be seen. “There is no doubt,” the magazine continued, “that by practice, with the aid of a magnifier, it would be possible to read phonetically Mr. Edison’s record of dots and dashes,*30 but he saves us the trouble by literally making it read itself. The distinction is the same as if, instead of perusing a book ourselves, we drop it into a machine, set the latter in motion, and behold! the voice of the author is heard repeating his own composition.”157

  Scientific American needed more than fifteen hundred words to describe the phonograph’s deceptively intricate operation. “No matter how familiar a person may be with modern machinery and its wonderful performances, or how clear in mind the principle underlying this strange device may be, it is impossible to listen to the mechanical speech without his experiencing the idea that his senses are deceiving him.” And the imagination also boggled at the uses its technology could be put to. Great singers would continue to sing, in their prime, long after they had lost their voices and died. Witnesses in court would have their testimony recorded down to the last stammer of denial. The children of the rich would hear proof of Papa’s determination and soundness of mind when deeding all to his mistress. And if one day, mirabile dictu, some other Edison were “to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience [and] add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices…it will be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.”158

  TINFOIL COULD TALK

  Edison did not wake up, in clichéd fashion, to find himself famous after the Scientific American article. Professional and popular plaudits were inhibited at first by the almost occult nature of his invention. When he applied for a patent on Christmas Eve, its originality so stunned examiners at the Patent Office that they issued one without question, not having any precedent to judge the instrument against. Then in an article published on the last day of the year, the Daily Cincinnati Enquirer referred to him as “Professor Edison,” and soon the honorific was applied routinely.159 Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, called him “the most ingenious inventor in this country,” adding after a pause, “or in any other.” To Sir William Thomson, he was the “first electrician of the age.” The French Académie des sciences allowed Tivador Puskás, Edison’s hastily appointed European agent for phonograph sales, to exhibit the instrument to its members. They greeted it with a reported “storm of applause,” even though many of them were aware that Charles Cros, a Parisian amateur engineer, had filed specifications for something similar, when Edison was still working on his motograph telephone receiver.*31 From London to Milan to San Francisco, the phonograph was the subject of scholarly lecture-demonstrations and celebrated as the greatest acoustical phenomenon of the century. Its inventor was compared to Franklin and Faraday, and became the subject of schoolgirl essays, religious editorials, and cartoon caricature. By March the “fire of genius” could always be seen burning in his “keen gray eyes,” hitherto blue. Then on 10 April The Daily Graphic hailed Edison as “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” an appellation that stuck even after Menlo Park was no more.160

  His laboratory lost its status as a secluded retreat. “Every day a dozen of the heavy lights of literature and science come here,” Edison complained to Benjamin Butler. Journalists and sightseers came up the boardwalk in such hordes he talked of “taking to the woods.”161 In fact he loved publicity and cultivated more of it, going so far as to thank The Daily Graphic for its coverage of the phonograph in an exquisitely calligraphed letter. His signature at the end was anything but modest —

  Edison’s letter of thanks to The Daily Graphic, 16 May 1878.

  —and in due course was adopted as his trademark.162

  Celebrity became eminence on 18 April, when he accepted an invitation to present the phonograph to the National Academy of Sciences during its spring assembly at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Before he was introduced at the afternoon session, George Barker of the University of Pennsylvania arranged a comparative hookup of Bell, Phelps, Gray, and Edison telephones. The first three systems, all magnetic, were plagued by weak signals and interference along a line to Philadelphia, whereas the last, boosted by its carbon button transmitter, sounded sharp and clear.163

  Edison declined to appear onstage and instead held court behind a desk in the president’s adjoining office. There was such a press of academicians wanting to see him that the doors to the room had to be taken off their hinges. Meanwhile he sat with the phonograph before him, nervously twisting a rubber band between his fingers. Never having been mobbed before and inhibited by his deafness, he proved a shy, awkward public figure and let Charles Batchelor do most of the demonstrating.164

  The machine—longer than the one he had shown to Scientific American, its rotation steadied by a flywheel—performed well, if not loudly, dropping some sibilants but responding with fidelity to some of the shouts, songs, whistles, and laughter projected at it by scientists forgetful of their dignity.165 They were uniformly amazed that tinfoil could talk. When the astrophysicist Henry Draper sought to resume the formal proceedings with a lecture on spectrography of the sun, he was hard put to make his own voice sound as thrilling.

  Edison relaxed as the day wore on. An interviewer dispatched by the Washington Evening Star noticed how animated he became in describing the latest products of his laboratory. He said he had just invented a device to measure the heat of stars. As for acoustic instruments, he was developing a disk phonograph “three or four times more powerful” than the cylinder model, and a “sort of improved ear trumpet,” with an air chamber inside, which should help him listen to far-off sound “with perfect distinctness.”166

  Quizzed about his deafness, he said it did not bother him. If he needed to hear the output of his acoustic devices clearly, he simply put a stick into his teeth and jammed it against the speaker diaphragm. That way, he explained, “I can hear more plainly than through the external ear.”

  For the rest of that night until two A.M., and through an equally long day following, he and Batchelor wore through yards of foil for the entertainment of Washington’s elite, from hundreds of lawmakers in the Capitol to a private demonstration for the commanding general of the U.S. Army, William Tecumseh Sherman. By way of a climax, an invitation came for Edison to do the same for President Rutherford B. Hayes—who would not let him leave the Executive Mansion until after midnight.167

  He sought relief in the Smithsonian museum from incessant gasps of astonishment and requests for replays of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” There he discovered, to his evident surprise, that in 1860 Scott de Martinville had used a needle-bristling membrane to trace speech patterns laterally on glass blackened with soot.*32 One of Scott’s “phonautographs” was on display and proved to be primarily a visual device, meant to show the unique waves of every voice. As such it was a recorder only, incapable of sonic reproduc
tion. Edison remarked that Scott would have been the father of the phonograph, had he been smart enough to inscribe in tinfoil instead of on glass.168

  Before heading home for Easter, he stopped by Mathew Brady’s photograph studio on Pennsylvania Avenue, sat in a chair that may once have been warmed by Lincoln, and posed with a hand on his lustrous invention, looking too tired to crank it one more time.169

  WHISPERS

  Surprisingly to some, Edison seemed to want to free himself of the phonograph after inventing it, patenting it, publicizing it, and licensing it out to the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company.170 This venture, organized on 24 April, listed Edward Johnson as its general agent and made the risky decision not to sell phonographs, but to exhibit them to paying customers. While Johnson took a machine on the road to regale lecture audiences with recorded “Recitations, Conversations, Songs (with words), Cornet Solos, Animal Mimicry, Laughter, Coughing etc.,” Edison made side deals for the marketing of talking toys and clocks, demanding a 20 percent royalty on every item sold and offering no help with the mechanics involved.171

  Before moving on to a project he considered more to his serious purpose as an inventor, he executed the first of two British phonograph patent applications that amounted to an astonishingly prescient survey of all the improvements and alternative designs he and other acoustic engineers would essay over the next quarter-century—disk records as well as cylinders; wax grooves instead of tinfoil ones; electromagnetic recording and reproduction; mass duplication by electroplating and the use of printing presses; even compressed-air amplification. For no inferable reason other than haste, he neglected to file for protection of these ideas in the United States and thereby committed himself to years of bitter later litigation.172