Abstract
On 7 December 1877, Thomas Edison and his associate, Charles Batchelor, visited the editor of Scientific American bringing with them “a little affair of a few pieces of metal, set up roughly on an iron stand about a foot square”. To the editor’s astonishment, the “little affair”, Edison’s first demonstration Phonograph, “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” (Fig. 7.1).
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Notes
- 1.
Scientific American. “The Talking Phonograph.” Scientific American, 22 December 1877, 384–85.
- 2.
Ibid. Also in TAEB 3:1150.
- 3.
J B McClure, Edison and His Inventions (Chicago: Rhodes & McClure, 1879), 75.
- 4.
Edison. Phonograph or Speaking Machine.
- 5.
Method of Producing Sound-Record Tablets. US Patent 1,690,159, filed 5 October 1926, and issued 6 November 1928.
- 6.
Conot, A Streak of Luck, 109–10.
- 7.
Edward Hibberd Johnson (1846–1917) Inventor and Edison associate. As manager of the Automatic Telegraph Company, Johnson hired 24-year-old Edison to work on automatic telegraphic instruments. Describing himself as an electrician, Johnson was an inventor in his own right and demonstrated Edison’s telephone (including the “musical telephone”) in public concerts. Johnson provided feedback and suggestions to Edison on improvements to the telephone and was subsequently to become a partner in Edison’s electric lighting companies. Johnson, when vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company in 1882, is credited as being the first person to decorate a Christmas tree with coloured electric lights.
- 8.
Joseph Henry (1797–1878) American scientist who made fundamental discoveries in electricity and magnetism. His prominence as a scientist enabled him to promote innovations in electrical technology, including those of Edison and Bell. Henry later became the first director of the Smithsonian Institution.
- 9.
Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 97–98.
- 10.
Evening Star. “The Phonograph at the Capitol.” Evening Star, 19 April 1878.
- 11.
Washington Post, “Genius before Science.”
- 12.
TAED MBSB1:171.
- 13.
William Croffut. “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” New York Graphic, 10 April 1878.
- 14.
TAED MBSB1:117.
- 15.
New York Sun. “The Inventor of the Age.” New York Sun, 29 April 1878.
- 16.
William Croffut (1835–1915) American Journalist.
- 17.
This invitation came through the efforts of George Barker, professor of physics at University of Pennsylvania, who had declined to support Edison’s Etheric force claims.
- 18.
Henry Draper (1837–1882) American physician, astronomer and son of John Draper (1811–1882) a noted physician, scientist and inventor who devised improvements to Louis Daguerre’s photographic process.
- 19.
quoted in Conot, A Streak of Luck, 120.
- 20.
Edison. Thermal Regulators for Electric Lights.
- 21.
Scientific American, “The Talking Phonograph.”
- 22.
TAEB 4:1260.
- 23.
Edison, His Life and Inventions. 206–07.
- 24.
Menlo Park Reminiscences, 1, 163.
- 25.
Thomas Edison, Genius of Electricity, Pioneers of Science and Discovery (London: Priory Press, 1974), 36.
- 26.
Edison: The Man Who Made the Future (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1977), 74.
- 27.
Edison: A Life of Invention, 144.
- 28.
“Talks with Edison,” Harpers Monthly, February 1890, 429.
- 29.
Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1981), 12–13.
- 30.
Electro-Chemical Receiving Telephone. US Patent 132,455, filed 25 July 1879, and issued 31 August 1880.
- 31.
TAEB 3, 3, 695–97.
- 32.
Patrick Feaster, “Speech Acoustics and the Keyboard Telephone: Edison’s Discovery of the Phonograph Principle,” ARSC Journal 38, no. 1 (2007). The problem with this reconstruction is that Edison already held several patents relating to the automatic telegraph (stock ticker) which transmitted and printed characters directly. Such a keyboard telephone would have offered no advance over the automatic telegraph, since transmission might at best, have transmitted at a speed of around 120 characters per minute (say 20–30 words per minute). This is faster than a good Morse telegrapher and slower than the automatic telegraph, for which Edison claimed speeds of up to 1500 characters per minute from pre-recorded tape.
- 33.
Hounshell, “Elisha Gray and the Telephone: On the Disadvantages of Being an Expert.”
- 34.
TAED NV12:8.
- 35.
Oxford English Dictionary, “Phonograph, V.” (Oxford University Press). http://www.oed.com/
- 36.
TAEB 3:969. For an analysis of these devices, see Feaster, “Speech Acoustics and the Keyboard Telephone: Edison’s Discovery of the Phonograph Principle.”
- 37.
TAEB 3:972
- 38.
Quoted in Hughes, “Edison’s Method,” 18.
- 39.
TAEB 3:972n4.
- 40.
TAEB 3:972n4.
- 41.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “Phonograph: A Machine That Talks and Sings.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 26 February 1878.
- 42.
TAED QP001:4 TAEB 3:972n4, Amos Jay Cummings. “A Marvellous Discovery.” New York Sun, 22 February 1878.
- 43.
TAEB 3:759.
- 44.
TAEB 3:1013n1.
- 45.
TAED QP001:56 57.
- 46.
American Graphophone Company versus Edison Phonograph Works.
- 47.
TAED QP001:63.
- 48.
TAED QP001:64.
- 49.
TAEB 3:972. Edison described the paper as “bibulous” by which he seems to have meant that it was absorbent.
- 50.
This document also includes a dated sketch marked “Kruesi make this Aug 12/77”. Kruesi did not make such a device until December.
- 51.
TAED QP001:11, 12.
- 52.
TAEB 3:1013.
- 53.
TAEB 3:1013.
- 54.
TAED QP001:11.
- 55.
Thomas A Edison. Improvement in Speaking Machine. US Patent 201,760, filed 4 March 1878, and issued 26 March 1878.
- 56.
TAEB 3:1040.
- 57.
TAED QP001:12.
- 58.
Edison. Phonograph or Speaking Machine.
- 59.
TAED TI2:269.
- 60.
TAEB 3:1062.
- 61.
TAEB 3:1099.
- 62.
TAED QP001:10.
- 63.
TAED TI2:342. If spoken at 80–100 words per minute (slow, loud speech being needed to produce a recording), this would have resulted in a recording time of 2–2.5 min, typical playing time of disc records up to the introduction of long playing records and still a common duration for pop music.
- 64.
TAEB 3:1102.
- 65.
New York Sun. “Echoes from Dead Voices.” New York Sun, 6 November 1877. http://edison.rutgers.edu/singldoc.htm (TAED MBSB1:77).
- 66.
New York Times. “The Phonograph.” New York Times, 5 November 1877, 4.
- 67.
TAEB 3:1103n4.
- 68.
TAEB 3:973.
- 69.
TAEB 3:1075.
- 70.
TAEB 3:1084.
- 71.
TAED QP001:50.
- 72.
TAEB 3:1119.
- 73.
TAED NV17:21.
- 74.
Edison. Phonograph or Speaking Machine.
- 75.
Quoted in Dyer and Martin, Edison, His Life and Inventions. 208.
- 76.
American Graphophone Company Vs Edison Phonograph Works,(1896).
- 77.
David Gooding, “Mapping Experiment as a Learning Process: How the First Electromagnetic Motor Was Invented.,” Science, Technology and Human Values 15, no. 2 (1990).
- 78.
Otto Sibum, “Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat: Instruments of Precision and Gestures of Accuracy in Early Victorian England,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26, no. 1 (1995).
- 79.
Paolo Palmieri, Reenacting Galileo’s Experiments: Rediscovering the Techniques of Seventeenth-Century Science (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).
- 80.
TAEB 3:972
- 81.
TAED QP001:10
- 82.
Paraffin was first identified and named by Karl Reichenbach, the same Reichenbach responsible for the Odic force theory that prompted Edison’s own Etheric force theory. W V Farrah, “Reichenbach, Karl (or Carl) Ludwig,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie (New York: Scribner, 1992).
- 83.
TAEB 3:1099.
- 84.
TAED QP001:49
- 85.
Ian Wills. 2011. “Experimental Phonograph Recording, Sample_1.” YouTube. https://youtu.be/O4wuFSDngQ8
- 86.
TAEB 3:767n1 This was on 27 July 1876.
- 87.
TAEB 3:972n4.
- 88.
Gorman, “Alexander Graham Bell’s Path to the Telephone”.
- 89.
Ian Wills. 2011. “Experimental Phonograph Recording, Sample_2.” YouTube. https://youtu.be/WZ82DUqdCuo; 2011. “Experimental Phonograph Recording, Sample_3.” YouTube. https://youtu.be/8eGt8hk8hEw; 2011. “Experimental Phonograph Recording, Sample_4.” YouTube. https://youtu.be/e3qYQ0P0kgo
- 90.
TAEB 3:972
- 91.
TAED NS77:03.
- 92.
Quoted in Dyer and Martin, Edison, His Life and Inventions. 208.
- 93.
TAED TI2:34.
- 94.
Ian Wills. 2011. “Experimental Phonograph Recording, Sample_1.” YouTube. https://youtu.be/O4wuFSDngQ8
- 95.
TAEB 3:972n4.
- 96.
TAEB 3:972
- 97.
TAEB 3:1117.
- 98.
New York Herald, December 21, 1879 quoted in Jehl 1937, 393.
- 99.
Friedel and Israel 1987, 35.
- 100.
Quoted in Rosanoff, “Edison in His Laboratory,” 406.
- 101.
TAEB 4:1570.
- 102.
TAEB 3:1119.
- 103.
Otto Sibum, “Experimental History of Science,” in Museums of Modern Science: Nobel Symposium 112, ed. Svante Lindqvist, Marika Hedin, and Ulf Larsson (Canton, MA: Science History Publications/USA, 2000), 77.
- 104.
Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy Part I Vol I, 85.
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Wills, I. (2019). Inventive Success: The Phonograph. In: Thomas Edison: Success and Innovation through Failure. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29940-8_7
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