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The
Birth... from page 2
existed today, it could be used to recreate Lincoln
talking. But Scott himself never completed the conceptual leap
that would have allowed him to reverse the process. Twenty years
later, another Frenchman named Charles Cros, looked at Scott's
apparatus and, based on his own knowledge of photography, theorized
that the a man's voice could be engraved and made to yield the
original sound. He filed a document embodying his idea - which
he called a Paleophone - with the French Academy of Sciences,
but was unable to build a single one. He succumbed to absinthe
in 1888. A phonograph which could record
and reproduce was finally invented in 1877 by someone who wasn't
looking for it at all. Thomas Edison had already spent years keeping
the Patent Office busy with a variety of new and improved telegraphs,
and had recently financed an invention factory in Menlo Park,
NJ. In the summer of 1877, not long after his thirtieth birthday,
he was experimenting with a method of recording and repeating
telegraph signals so that messages could be automatically relayed
at a faster speed down the line. Because of an accident with a
soon-to-be-patented telegraph repeater, and perhaps also because
of his own defective hearing, he imagined that the paper indentations
could store up and reproduce the human voice perfectly. Morse
code would no longer be necessary. But despite the centuries of
anticipation, and the decades of attempts to actually
build such a machine, nobody |
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really knew what to
do with it. Well, of course, it ought to be patented, and on the
day before Christmas in 1877, Edison filed for an Improvement
in Speaking Machines. Despite a flurry of success and grand plans
for talking dolls, clocks, and widespread paid exhibitions, the
phonograph soon lost its initial glow, although the patent was
granted in less than two months. Because of his background in
telegraphy, Edison had used the term indenting to describe the
vibrations in his rotating sheets of tin foil. The rival telephone,
however, rapidly caught the public's imagination and pocketbook,
and Edison briefly contemplated using the phonograph to record
and relay telephone messages for customers who could not afford
the annual $150 rental fee for Bell's invention. What was supposed
to be a restful visit out West in the Summer of 1878 to view a
solar eclipse led to Edison's new interest in the electric light;
the sounds of the phonograph, and all its myriad schemes, were
soon put aside and neglected by others as well. Who can say why
interest in the idea gradually revived over the next few years?
When Alexander Graham Bell failed to gain monetary support for
a futuristic idea of sending telephone messages by sunlight and
selenium, he instead used an 1880 prize for his invention of the
phone to finance independent research, on better ways to record
and reproduce sound; like Edison, his intimacy with deafness served
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His work, and that of his associates,
eventually led to the formation of the Columbia Phonograph
Co. and managed to stir Edison's fancy once again. By the
late 1880s, both companies (and soon-to-be bitter rivals)
tried to introduce the phonograph and graphophone as dictation
equipment, but when that plan failed, both sides jumped at
the idea of building arcades of coin-operated machines which
needed a steady supply of musical records and song-writing
skills. If one studies the frequency of phonograph-related
patents during the Nineties, one can easily observe a wave
of new ideas for coin-operated entertainment - they weren't
called jukeboxes yet - although they could usually be found
in saloons and ferry boats. Based on surviving arcade receipts,
the average coin-slot phonograph of that time took in more
cash in one year than the typical Patent Examiner was paid.
The machines, with their incessant appetite for new titles,
slowly began to challenge the sale of sheet music as a source
of popular entertainment. Because each phonograph was also
a recorder, a talented amateur could easily make records at
home, and some of the first problems with censorship arose
when enterprising showmen experimented with risque cylinders.
The first advance labeling of records occurred when Columbia
advertised a special group of records,
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Series, but most companies settled for simple double-entendres.
Between 1888 and 1894, most of the phonograph patents were controlled
by the North American Phonograph Company. Unfortunately, that
same time period was marked by recession and economic panic, causing
the "dictation" side of the business to fail. But the
taste for musical entertainment on demand, once acquired, was
too much to hold back for long. The prices of the phonographs
and records began to drop in the mid-nineties as the anticipated
market changed, and the spring motor was substituted for the earlier
electric and treadle versions. Once the selling price dropped
below $40 apiece, the phonograph was well on its way to becoming
an instrument of mass popular culture. While
Edison and Columbia (and some smaller companies) competed with
rival hit-lists of the latest cylinder records, a relatively unknown
inventor, with some success in the infant telephone industry,
began to develop a new form of record - the disc. Emile Berliner's
first hand-driven models were put on sale in Washington, DC by
1893, utilizing 7" diameter, single-sided discs made of celluloid,
but no other company took him seriously. The surface noise of
the record and lack of a suitable motor and governor certainly
kept sales down. But he filed for a series of patents in his adopted
language, convincing the Patent Office to use a term he had invented
as well - the gramophone. He organized several companies, but generally spent |
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more money
than he took in. Chance then intervened and in late 1896, he was
introduced through a newspaper ad to an inventor of book-binding
equipment in Camden, NJ. Eldridge Johnson was barely making ends
meet in his machine shop when he was introduced to the machine
that talks talk! Together with Levi Montross, a metal-shingle
inventor, he constructed a cheap, reliable, spring-driven gramophone
($25) which was soon to cut into the sales of the dominant cylinder
industry. For the new material of his records, Berliner used the
same ingredient he knew from his years of working with telephone
mouthpieces - a mixture of shellac and cotton flocking. By 1901,
Johnson and Berliner had formed the Victor Talking Machine Co.,
and the rest, as they say, is  history.
However, the dog so frequently
portrayed in front of their machine was a repainted import; Nipper
had originally appeared in England listening to His Master's Voice
on an Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph and the original player
was painted over by the artist who owned the dog. Berliner had
the foresight to trademark this charming scene in 1900, and it
soon became the world's most recognizable advertising symbol.
Why a fox terrier would be considered a role model in determining musical taste remains a mystery. In 1899, the US Patent Office |
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received an application from an engineer with the Copenhagen
Telephone Co. Valdemar Poulsen had a truly radical idea, to
magnetize steel wire and then play back the original message
without any physical change in the recording material. But
the omens were not good. Unfortunately for him, the Patent
Office felt that his invention was contrary to all known laws
of magnetism. They wanted him to supply a working model (a
requirement which had been abandoned in 1880) and to come
over himself to demonstrate it. His lawyer argued that this
would be prohibitively expensive and a compromise was worked
out where he would demonstrate it in Europe and officials
there would testify to its success. This was done to everyone's
satisfaction, and the patent office yielded and granted him
a patent on his method. However, at first no one had noticed
that Poulsen's American application was filed one week late
- exceeding the seven-month limitation on non-U.S. citizens.
The patent could not be rescinded, but it would have no legal
value. Luckily, Poulsen was able to institute action in the
US Congress, partly blaming a clerk in his lawyer's employ
and an Examiner in the Patent Office, and a Bill for the Relief
of Valdemar Poulsen was passed in 1903 - a rare event indeed.
The irony of all this struggle to patent the Telegraphone
was that, despite its initial success, few were built or
Turn to The Birth...page 11
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