Of Talking Machines And Wizards: The History of Recorded Sound, Part One

Of Talking Machines And Wizards

     by Michael Daisy

The title of this piece (the first of three parts) introduces its subject as a history of recorded sound, rather than music or anything entertainment-related. That's intentional. Like most people, you probably consider recording and music or musical entertainment two sides of the same coin That, however, is not how it started out.

For the record, this is an overview. It is intended to be neither complete nor comprehensive. There is far too much information out there to cover everything in this setting. It is not THE history of recorded sound. It is A history of recorded sound.

A History of Recorded Sound, Part One

In the June 1878 edition of North American Review magazine, Thomas Edison listed "Reproduction of Music" as one suggested use of his new phonograph invention. It was number four of 10. The three above it were:

1. "Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer,"

2. "Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part," and

3. "The teaching of elocution."

Consider Columbia Records, a gigantic, multi-tentacled media concern. It lords over countless smaller record labels, and has a stable of best-selling recording artists that include the likes of Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett, Mariah Carey, and Bob Dylan.

While it was the first company to sell recorded music (on cylinders), it started out as a manufacturer of business machines, and distributor of Edison phonographs.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the oldest surviving recordings are of the spoken word variety.

Speaking of Edison… Most people are aware that it was Thomas Edison who invented the phonograph. It was, in fact, his favorite of the many inventions credited to him. But mention the names of similar and related devices, such as the Phonautograph, Peleophone, and Graphophone and, most likely, you'll get a puzzled look in response.

There is no question of the importance of Edison's contributions to sound recording. However, he didn't do it alone, nor was he working in a vacuum when the breakthrough occurred.

Ancient Foundations

Creation of sound by artificial or mechanical means has been around for thousands of years. The drum was a natural outgrowth of man's love of beating on things and making noise. The didgeridoo (or didjeridu, if you prefer) is the oldest known wind instrument. It has been used for thousands of years by the aboriginal peoples of Australia.

A noteworthy example of a sound-producing device, is, or rather, was, the Colossi of Memnon, a pair of stone statues located along the Nile opposite the City of Luxor in Egypt.

It’s a bit of a stretch to link these stone beings to luminaries like Thomas Edison, but some distinguished centers of higher learning do. And so, to paraphrase Gene Lockhart's Judge Henry X. Harper in the holiday classic Miracle on 34th Street, 'if established centers of higher learning see fit to consider the Colossus a precursor to the phonograph and compact disc, this writer will not disagree.' The ability to charge tuition for your interpretation of things tends to generate its own credibility.

And so without further ado, the Colossi. Actually, we are concerned only with one of the pair.

The Colossi were constructed from blocks of quartzite sandstone during the reign of Amenhotep III in the 15th century BCE (Before Common Era). The twin giants originally served as guards at the entrance of Amenhotep's memorial temple, a massive complex where the pharaoh was worshipped as a god during his lifetime and after.

The twin depictions of a seated Amenhotep stood as silent sentinels for well over a thousand years until the temple was destroyed in a devastating earthquake in 27 BCE. The quake collapsed one of the statues from the waist up.

At the time of the quake, Egypt was in the twilight of the period of Hellenistic Ptolemaic rule. It wasn't long after the quake subsided that the partially collapsed Colossi became associated with Memnon, the Greek hero killed at Troy as he greeted his mother, Aurora, goddess of the dawn.

Accordingly at dawn, the statue would sing, a sound that has been described as a whistle, a bell, a low moan, or a plucked harp string. It is believed the "vocalizations" resulted from the heating and expansion of the stone by rays of the morning sun interacting with cooler air within the cracks and crevices of the statue’s interior.

Hearing the statue sing was supposed to bring good luck. The "Vocal Memnon" drew visitors from throughout the known world. They came to hear the statue and experience the oracular powers it apparently picked up along the way.

The singing ended abruptly in the year 199 when the Roman Emperor of the time, Septimius Severus (146-211), reassembled the statue in an effort to gain favor with the oracle. Apparently, the goddess Aurora didn't consider the Emperor's gesture worth considering.

A seemingly endless array of devices able to reproduce sound by mechanical means -- organs, carillons, music boxes, and other marvels -- would appear over the course of succeeding centuries. But it wasn't until the 19th century that devices capable of reproducing recorded sound made their appearance.

Before Edison

Around 1806, English physician and naturalist Thomas Young reportedly created a visual image of a tuning fork's vibrations in the wax covering of a rotating cylinder. He was able to use the image to measure minute increments of time by using a known frequency.

Roughly a half-century later, on March 25, 1857, the French government granted Edourd-Leon Scott de Martinville a patent (#17,897/31,470) for a device he called a Phonautograph that created visual images of sound waves.

Scott's phonautograph looks immediately familiar to anyone who has seen images of Edison's phonograph. It should since both machines operate on the same basic principles.

Scott (1817-79) was a printer, librarian, bookseller, and inventor. Though he had French royal blood flowing through his veins, his family lacked the money to live in a style they would undoubtedly have enjoyed in an earlier, more opulent time. Denied the opportunity to pursue a life of idle indulgence, the young Scott embarked upon a career as a printer's apprentice.

At the stage of his training where he was tasked with reading and correcting proofs, Scott immersed himself in the manuscripts he encountered. He subsequently sought out and engaged many of the learned authors in conversation. This, in turn, influenced his decision to invent.

A small sampling of those who inspired Scott are Henri Victor Regnault (1817-78), best known for measuring the thermal properties of gas; Jean Baptiste Biot (1774-1862), a physicist, astronomer and mathematician who ascended in a hot air balloon to study the Earth's atmosphere; and Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1836), a physicist given primary credit for discovering electromagnetism.

Phonautograph

Scott used the anatomy of the human ear as a basis for the phonautograph. Sound to be recorded was funneled through a horn to a diaphragm that vibrated. A hog's bristle was attached to the diaphragm.

The bristle in the 1857 version of his recorder etched a pattern on a lamp-blacked glass plate. Two years later he incorporated lamp-blacked paper attached to a rotating cylinder to capture images of the sound.

The phonautograph could only reproduce images of the sound it recorded. In any event, reproducing recordings was never part of the plan. Scott was trying to create a type of oral shorthand.

Scott attempted to market his invention, and even succeeded in producing a few devices with the help of Rudolf Koenig, a German manufacturer of musical instruments. He made the odd sale or two – including one to Joseph Henry for the Smithsonian Institution in 1866 – but he never reached the point where he was able to give up his day job.

For all intents and purposes, the phonautograph was a dismal failure. It was a well-executed device based on a faulty premise. Although his early sound etchings were digitally scanned and played back for the first time as sound recordings in 2008, it was more than a century too late. Scott died poor on April 26, 1879, without ever having developed the oral shorthand his machine was supposed to facilitate.

Though Scott fell short of his goal, his work was not in vain. Roughly 20 years after the phonautograph was patented, another Frenchman took the next logical step in sound recording

Inspired Lunacy

Charles Cros (1842-1888) was an inventor, poet, humorous writer, and an excellent example of the fine line between genius and insanity. He invented a number of improvements in the field of photography, including an early process for color photography. He is also responsible for several improvements to telegraph technology.

Charles Cros

On the other hand, he believed pinpoints of light he observed on the surfaces of Venus and Mars were produced by the lights of large cities. They were most likely the result of the reflected light of the Sun from high clouds. Nevertheless, Cros spent years petitioning the French government to build a giant mirror capable of communicating with the Martians.

He went to his grave absolutely convinced of the existence of life on Mars, and unaware of the technical impossibility of his mirror.

On a more down to earth level in 1877, Cros almost beat Edison to the punch on sound recording. Almost.

In a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Paris dated April 30 of that year, Cross proposed recording and playing back sound on a device very similar to Scott's phonautograph. Cros called his device a Paleophone.

The device incorporated a cylinder on which the vibrations of the sound recorded were etched by a screw into a metal surface for durability's sake. He suggested the possibility of reproducing the original sound by retracing the pattern.

Similarities between Cros' proposal and what Edison was doing at the time were remarkable considering neither was aware of what the other was doing. Unfortunately for Cros, the paleophone was only an idea. He didn't have a working model.

Cros' letter was read in public on December 3, 1877. A scholarly article written by l'Abbe' Leblanc was published in the journal La Semaine du Clerge on October 10, 1878. Of course, by then it was too late.

The Father of Voice Mail

According to various accounts, Thomas Edison was engaged in work involving the telegraph and telephone in 1877 when he was struck by the inspiration for the Phonograph.

He was working on a machine capable of transcribing telegraphic messages as indentations on paper tape that could be used to send the same message repeatedly. This led him to consider the possibility of repeatedly sending voice messages by means of the telephone invented only the previous year by Alexander Graham Bell. It was a small step from there to the phonograph.

Edison's first phonograph was based on his telegraphic repeater. It incorporated two diaphragms and a metal cylinder covered with paraffin paper. One diaphragm was used for recording, the other for playback. Sometime before December, the recording medium was switched to tin foil.

Edison made a drawing from which his mechanic, John Kruesi built the machine between December 1-6, 1877. It was on the 6th that Edison made and heard his historic recording of "Mary had a little lamb."

It is speculated that Edison recorded the word "Halloo" on paper with his telegraphic repeater in July. Regardless, neither recording survives, and anyone having any connection has long since passed into history.

The Wizard of Menlo Park recreated the "Mary had a little lamb" recording on August 12, 1927 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the event. It was captured for a Fox Movietown Newsreel at Edison's home in West Orange, New Jersey.

Edison applied for the American patent for his talking machine on Christmas Eve, 1877. Patent number 200,521 was granted on February 19, 1878.

The world's oldest surviving sound recording is a recitation of "The Lord's Prayer" by Emile Berliner. The recording was made on an Edison cylinder machine. It is currently in the possession of the BBC in London, England.

 Postscript

Possible future uses for the phonograph suggested by Thomas Edison in North American Review, June 1878:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.

2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.

3. The teaching of elocution.

4. Reproduction of music.

5. The "Family Record" – a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.

6. Music-boxes and toys.

7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.

8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.

9. Educational purposes: such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that a pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.

10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.

Next: Competition

Sources:

About.com – AOL.com – HighBeam Encyclopedia – Inventors Hall of Fame – Kipnotes.com – TalkingMachine.org – University of San Diego/Department of History – Wikipedia.