Quest for Sound: Thomas Edison's Phonograph

views updated

Quest for Sound: Thomas Edison's Phonograph

Overview

Thomas Edison (1847-1931) has gone down in history as one of the great inventors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was responsible for developing the first electric light bulb, as well as the early motion picture industry. But arguably his greatest, and certainly his fondest, invention was the phonograph, which was not only groundbreaking, but laid the foundation for the future music recording industry.

Background

When he was just 11 years old, Edison would disappear into his family's cellar, neglecting his schoolwork, for hours on end. His family would discover him experimenting with all sorts of chemicals, creating strange and mysterious concoctions. It was the earliest spark of genius in a man who would come to personify invention.

In July 1877, while trying to develop a new and better transmitter for the telephone—invented the previous year by Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), Edison first discovered that he was able to create an impression on a piece of wax paper that could actually record sound. Soon after he wrote in his diary, ". . . there is no doubt that I should be able to store up and reproduce at any future time the human voice perfectly."

Edison was not the first to record sound; a French inventor had done so 20 years before. What made Edison's discovery unique was that he was also able to play it back. Soon after, the word "phonograph" began to appear in Edison's notes. The first phonograph was a simple apparatus. To make a recording, a person would speak into a funnel-like mouthpiece that directed sound into a thin metal diaphragm. When the sound waves struck the diaphragm, they caused it to vibrate. As the diaphragm vibrated, it caused an attached needle to also vibrate, which then made indentations on a thin piece of tinfoil. To play back the recording, the procedure was reversed, making the needle and diaphragm vibrate, and sending back the sound.

Edison's first recorded words were memorable but not profound: "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go." Nevertheless, when Edison heard this simple nursery rhyme played back in his own voice, he said he "was never so taken aback in all my life."

Impact

When the public first heard of Edison's invention, they thought he was a magician. In fact, he was dubbed "the Wizard of Menlo Park," named for the New Jersey town where he lived and worked. Hordes of reporters descended upon Edison's home and laboratory. Huge audiences came to see traveling demonstrations of his new and wondrous device. He was invited to Washington, D.C., to showcase his new phonograph to an astounded Congress. While there, he paid a late night visit to President Rutherford B. Hayes, who excitedly awoke his wife so that she, too, could witness the miraculous phonograph.

But the early excitement of the phonograph faded quickly as Edison became distracted by another of his great inventions—electricity. In 1881 Alexander Graham Bell, who had long wondered why he had not come up with the idea for the phonograph, decided to take up the project where Edison had left off. Edison's early recordings were of poor quality, could only play for a minute or two, and deteriorated after only a few uses. Bell thought he could do better. With prize money awarded by the French government, he set up a lab in Washington, D.C., to begin work. Bell's assistants—his cousin Chichester Bell, a chemist, and Charles Tainter (1854-1940), a scientist—produced their own version of the phonograph, which they named the graphophone. Instead of using tin foil, which could only be played two or three times, the graphophone instead used the more durable wax-covered cardboard. Edison's clunky hand crank was also replaced with a motor driven by a foot treadle.

Bell suggested that he and Edison work together and pool their patents to create one superior product, to which Edison bitterly replied, "Under no circumstances will I have anything to do with Graham Bell" and his band of "pirates." Instead, Edison challenged his competitor by creating a better and cheaper machine than Bell's. In June 1888 Edison's improved version of the phonograph was completed.

When Edison had first begun work on his phonograph, he came up with a list of things his invention could be used for. High on that list was taking office dictation, which he believed would be the machine's primary function. He was to be proven wrong. As early as 1890, music became the main use for the phonograph. In concert halls and sing-alongs, people gathered to hear their favorite tunes. In penny arcades, phonograph parlors, and train stations, people lined up to drop a nickel in the slot and hear Gilbert and Sullivan songs, operatic overtures, and vaudeville comedy monologues. Bell's graphophone also gained similar popularity during this time.

But even as the phonograph grew in appeal, it was still limited by the fact that cylinders could not be mass produced. This meant that Edison's workers had to painstakingly mold each individual cylinder, while performers three floors above sang the same song, over and over, to make each individual recording.

In the 1890s Edison was once again distracted from his work on the phonograph; this time, by the newly emerging motion picture. While he was away, his rival Bell began marketing the graphophone for its first home use, with a new spring motor to make it lightweight and inexpensive. At around the same time another Edison rival was gaining prominence in the recording industry. The Berliner Gramophone, invented by Emil Berliner (1851-1929), would become the first record player to use discs instead of cylinders.

In 1901 Berliner founded the Victor Talking Machine Company, and the next year opened a record factory. Now, for the first time, records could be easily mass-produced. Berliner also attempted to appeal to public taste when deciding what type of music to record. Previously, Edison made his decisions based on his own taste, which ran toward sentimental ballads like "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen." Victor's catalog offered a wide variety of artists, including the famed opera singer Enrico Caruso. The company was also responsible for creating the world's first home entertainment system—the Victrola, which featured a cabinet in which to store records, and hid the big horn, making it look more like an elegant piece of furniture. The public went wild for this new invention.

Edison worked to meet Victor's challenge by introducing a new, longer, four-minute cylinder and by developing a machine that would compete with the Victrola—the Amberola. But it was now clear that the public wanted discs, and Edison would have to follow demand if he was to continue making money.

He did so by working around the clock to create an even better disc machine than his competitor. Edison's goal was to "produce a disc machine free from a mechanical tone, distortion of the original sounds and free from those irritating scratchy sounds now in all disc machines." In 1915 Edison's disc phonographs were finally ready to challenge the Victrola. While they sold reasonably well, they were never able to reach Victor's sales. Although the fidelity was better in Edison's product, Victor still had a larger catalog of artists.

Then, in 1920, a new invention emerged called radio. Soon, everyone was tuning in to the static-filled broadcasts and tuning out their phonographs. Edison's son encouraged his father to enter the radio business, but he resisted the radio invasion, calling it merely a "fad." By 1929, faced with plummeting sales, Edison was forced to admit defeat and close his phonograph company forever.

Edison's phonograph had not only created thousands of jobs, but it led to the development of the recording industry as we know it today. Future improvements would include the LP, or long playing record, in the 1940s, stereophonic sound in the late 50s, and, in 1982, the compact disc. Edison would go on to become a pioneer in the early motion picture industry. However, it was the phonograph that would be his most prized invention, and the one for which he retains the sobriquet "the Wizard of Menlo Park."

STEPHANIE WATSON