Competition
by Michael Daisy
 |
| Thomas Edison |
A History of Recorded Sound, Part Two
The phonograph was the first invention of
substance to come out of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park invention factory. Of the
1,093 inventions credited to him, it was his favorite and would remain so for
the rest of his life.
The creation of the phonograph was one of those
technological breakthroughs where everything fell neatly into place, as opposed
to Edison's trials and tribulations with the incandescent lamp for which he
painstakingly tested thousands of different materials before finding the right
one. About the incandescent ordeal he later recalled, "Before I got
through I tested no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths, and ransacked the world
for the most suitable filament material."
Even before December 24, 1877, when he applied
for a patent on his talking machine, Edison was busily promoting his machine.
The December 22, 1877 edition of Scientific
American documented the inventor's
recent visit to the magazine's New York City offices:
"Mr. Thomas A Edison recently came into
this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the
machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed
us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night."
The event was covered by newspapers in the
city, and in short order by those in other parts of the country.
The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was
established on January 24, 1878 to capitalize on the public's fascination with
the machine. He received $10,000 for the manufacturing and sales rights, and
20-percent of the profits.
In the June 1878 edition of North American Review, Edison offered 10
suggested uses for the phonograph (see previous installment). By that time,
however, the novelty of the talking machine had seemingly peaked, and Edison
left promotional efforts to others, while he turned his attention to the
incandescent light bulb.
In the meantime, others, among them Alexander
Graham Bell, became involved. Where Edison considered his phonograph state of
the art, Bell and others saw room for improvement. In fact, while Edison's
device was a big hit with the public, it was hard to operate, the foil
recording medium was easily torn, and had a short, useable life.
Into The Breach
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so the void created
by Edison's diversion from the sound field was soon filled by others, Charles
Sumner Tainter (1854-1940) was among the first.
Tainter was an engineer and inventor, an
avocation he may have picked up from his father, the inventor of an automatic
wood-boring tool. Although he attended public schools, he was largely
self-taught from technical journals at the public library and from his father's
subscription to Scientific American. After establishing a
scientific instrument manufacturing business in his hometown of Watertown MA in
1878, Tainter became acquainted with Alexander Graham Bell, who was a customer
for whom he made electrical devices.
 |
| Charles Tainter |
In 1879, Tainter accepted Bell's invitation to
relocate to Washington, D.C. to establish a laboratory and work with him on the
development of sound-based technologies. The following year, Bell and Tainter
developed the Radiophone, a device that used light waves and selenium cells (a
mineral having semiconducting properties) to transmit sound wirelessly. Their
efforts were rewarded with a gold medal at the 1881 Electrical Exhibition in
Paris.
Meanwhile in 1881 in D.C., the pair were joined
by a first cousin of Bell's with a truly tongue twister of a name, Chichester
A. Bell. The newly arrived Bell – a noted London-based chemist – had come for
the expressed purpose of producing an improved phonograph that would be called
the "Graphophone", an obvious play on the name of Edison's invention.
Their partnership, which became known as the Volta Lab, was financed from the
40,000 French franc prize money won by Alexander for his telephone invention in
1876.
Charles Tainter and his two partners initially
set out to improve Edison's tin foil recording and playback medium. They
achieved initial success with a flexible foil before discarding it in favor of
wax when their work was interrupted by the assassination of President James A.
Garfield by Charles Guiteau. Attention in the lab was abruptly shifted from the
Graphophone to efforts to create an improved audible induction balance device
(an early type of metal detector) in a frantic but futile attempt to devise a
way to find the assassin’s bullet and save the President's life.
Once work on the Graphophone resumed, Bell and
company eventually perfected their wax recording and playback medium with the
addition of carnauba wax to improve its durability and decrease surface noise
caused by the stylus rubbing against the inside of the groove.
Continued research led first to the
introduction of the Dictaphone – the name of a much-respected brand that has
survived into the 21st century, even as the once ubiquitous business product of
the same name has largely been edged out by newer technologies and products –
then to the Graphophone, itself.
The Bells and Tainter's efforts to market the
Graphophone were initially blocked by Edison's unsuccessful challenge to the
validity of their patent. Later when approached about joining forces with the
Volta Lab team to jointly produce a phonograph that incorporated the best
qualities of their respective inventions into a single device, Edison refused,
determined to improve the Phonograph on his own.
The Volta Graphophone Company was created in
January 1886 to control the patents and commercial development of Tainter's and
the two Bell's sound recording and reproduction technologies, the first of
which was issued in 1887. At that time, the Volta Graphophone Company became
the American Graphophone Company, which would evolve into Columbia Records,
which would later become part of Sony.
The Columbia Phonograph Co. was organized on
January 15, 1889 by Edward D. Easton "with rights to market a
treadle-powered graphophone. Easton, however, would have more success selling
music than business machines, especially cylinders of the popular United States
Marine Band under the direction of John Philip Sousa. Easton produced the first
record catalog in 1890. It was a one-page listing of available Edison and
Columbia cylinders.
At Menlo Park, Edison's efforts to market his
phonograph as a business machine were similarly unsuccessful. He, too, shifted
his focus to entertainment, selling pre-recorded cylinders of popular music.
These embryonic marketing efforts would transform the music business – an
unorganized conglomeration of performers, songwriters, publishers, and theater
owners – from little more than a cottage industry into a multinational behemoth
in the century to come.
Another Voice Heard From
The third major player in the sound
recording/reproduction game would produce a device that would prove to be the
most significant variant of the "talking machines".
Emile Berliner (1851-1929) was born into a
family of Jewish merchants in Hanover, Germany. Although he did follow family
tradition by completing an apprenticeship as a merchant, his real passion was
inventing, while he worked as an accountant to make ends meet. He migrated to
the United States in 1870 to avoid being drafted into service during the
Franco-Prussian War.
In the US, Berliner performed a succession of
menial jobs while attending physics classes at night at Cooper Union Institute
in New York City. He soon found himself attracted to the newly emerging field
of audio technologies, Bell's telephone and Edison's phonograph in particular.
His earliest efforts led to a patent in 1885
for an early type of microphone that was picked up by the Bell Telephone
Company for use as an improved telephone transmitter. The following year
Berliner received a patent for the "Gramophone", a sound recording
and playback device.
Like Edison's phonograph, and the Volta Lab's
graphophone, Berliner's first gramophone employed a wax-coated cylinder. But
while Berliner employed means similar to his predecessors/competitors to
achieve results, he recognized the cylinder's inherent disadvantages, and
realized its wax medium was too soft and fragile for permanent recordings. He
focused his attention on developing more durable mediums.
Gramophones produced after 1888 discarded
cylinders in favor of techniques used by Leon Scott's Phonautograph. These
later machines used discs on spinning turntables, and so more closely resembled
the record players and turntables familiar to people today. Discs were made
initially of celluloid, then of harder, vulcanized rubber. Recordings were
created on a master disc made of zinc. Sound was funneled through a horn, which
transferred it to a stylus, which in turn, etched the sound signal onto the
master. The etched master disc was then reproduced on playback discs in a
process that would be readily understood by people today.
By 1893, Berliner had sold 1000 machines, and
with continual improvements and tweaks, his gramophone would exert increasing
influence over consumers.
Berliner's significance was emphasized by a
conspicuous lack of
standardization in the early years of the field of sound
recording and reproduction. Thomas Edison has justly received his share of
kudos as the inventor of the phonograph – the record player. Edison, however,
was far more interested in doing whatever was necessary to make his device work
than he was with incidental matters such as stylus materials, the size of the
groove, and playback speed. On the other hand, Berliner, like Charles Tainter,
Alexander and Chichester Bell, set out to make a better mousetrap, not invent
it. He was able to focus on individual components.
 |
| 1895 Gramophone |
For example, Edison employed a jewel for his
stylus. Berliner used the points of steel sewing needles and pins, which were
obviously of a more uniform size and less expensive. The use of steel styluses
allowed him to determine a consistent size and depth of grooves, which in turn,
allowed him to determine that a turntable speed in the range of 70-90 rpm
produced the best listening results.
Not being one to rest on his laurels, Berliner
would carry on with his tinkering and experimentation for the rest of his life.
He continued to invent things including, in 1910, an early version of a
helicopter. In 1901, Berliner with Elbridge Johnson (1867-195) founded the
Victor Talking Machine Company, which in 1929 would be acquired by the Radio
Corporation of America, or RCA. "His Master's Voice," the company's
logo is a licensed reproduction of the painting of the same name by English
artist Francis Barraud. The painting depicts Nipper, a fox terrier reacting to
a recording of the voice of his dead master Mark Barraud (the artist's brother)
played back on a gramophone.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the
technology that would enable the music entertainment industry to grow
prosperous beyond anyone's previous expectations was firmly established. And
like all emerging technologies, the foundational work of Thomas Edison, Charles
Tainter, Alexander, and Chichester Bell, and Emile Berliner was improved upon
by countless supplemental developments and discoveries.
A small sampling of those supplemental
developments included:
Shellac (a resin secreted by the female lac
bug, a native of forested regions of Asia) replaced vulcanite as a source
material for recorded discs in 1897. The relatively heavy 9-ounces of a typical
steel stylus used on most playback equipment, however, continued to cause heavy
wear. On the other hand, the rapidly growing number of new, low-cost and
reliable machines such as the Columbia Eagle Graphophone, the Edison Gem
Cylinder Phonograph, and Berliner's improved Gramophone spurred strong sales of
commercial cylinders and discs primarily classical works, and "Tin Pan
Alley" songs.
A case in point about costs is the Edison
phonograph. A typical consumer paid $150 for one in 1891, the equivalent of
paying $3,750 in 2012. By 1898, the cost of an Edison cylinder machine had
dropped to $20, or the 2012 equivalent of $555.
In 1898, Valdemar Poulsen, the son of a Danish
High court judge, patented the "Telegraphone", a method of, and
apparatus for, effecting the storing up of speech or signals by magnetically
influencing magnetisable bodies"… the first magnetic recorder. Poulsen's
device used steel wire as a recording medium, making him the father of the
aircraft flight recorder, or "black box", the reel-to-reel tape
recorder, 8-track tape player, and compact cassette. The American patent of
Poulsen's device, #661,619, was validated in 1903.
In 1900, Thomas Lambert developed the
technology to mass-produce indestructible celluloid cylinders.
"Indestructible," in his usage was not a testament of the durability
of the playing surface of discs and cylinders, but a reference to the surface
medium’s ability to capture a greater range of frequencies.
Unfortunately for Lambert – whose patent,
#645,920, was validated by US courts – he ran afoul of Thomas Edison, possibly
because the Menlo Park Wizard objected to the use of the word
"phonograph" in the name of Lambert's company, Indestructible
Phonograph Record Company. Edison used the courts to drive Lambert out of business
by 1907. Still, Lambert's method of making a "copper negative matrix by
electrolysis" from a wax master, and using heat and pressure to mold
"durable celluloid copies" is a close enough approximation of the
process used to manufacture vinyl records today.
 |
| Victor Humpback model Victrola |
In 1912, technicians at Emile Berliner's
British Gramophone
Next: The Consumer Marketplace
Sources:
Amps.net – Audio Engineering Society –
CollectorsWorldWest.com – DaveManuel.com – Encyclopedia Britannica – The
History of Recording technology (Recording-History.org) – Invent Now/Hall of
Fame – Library of Congress – Newville, Leslie J., Development of the Phonograph
at Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory; (Gutenberg.org) – The Great Idea
Finder – Vinylville.com – Wikipedia.
