A RESURGING INTEREST IN VINYL brings up the fascinating origins of recorded sound—and its two rivals Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner. My principal source for these tidbits is Lenny Lipton’s The Cinema in Flux , accompanied by my usual Internet sleuthing.
HILL-AND-DALE. Lipton observes, “Edison’s 1877 invention of sound recording, the phonograph, may have been his most extraordinary feat: he seemingly pulled it out of thin but vibrating air. In this case there was no competitor, no other inventor who was close to coming up with a practical means for recording and playing back sound….”
Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees. Portrait by Louis Bachrach, restored by Michel Vuijlsteke from Wikipedia.
“Edison’s invention,” Lipton describes, “consisted of a transducer that turned changes in air pressure into a record of sound’s waveform on a deformable medium, originally tin foil wrapped on a spinning cylinder. Sound was recorded by creating grooves in a foil using vibrations transmitted from a sound-collecting horn to a diaphragm to move a stylus (needle) in an up-and-down direction, which came to be known as the hill-and-dale method.
The top portion of the USP cover sheet describing Edison’s phonograph. This and the following image from The Cinema in Flux.
SIDE-TO-SIDE. Lipton contrasts, “Gramophone disks, on the other hand, are made with a side-to-side or lateral groove.” He also notes, “Berliner’s Gramophone… was superior for handling, storage, and manufacturability compared with the Edison or Bell cylindrical records. The disk embodiment is described in USP 564,586, Gramophone, filed November 7, 1887.”
From the cover sheet of Berliner’s patent. Note, neither the Berliner nor Edison design used any electronics (or, for that matter, electricity of any kind).
Lipton describes, “In this embodiment, the recording stylus (29) remains in place and a glass mastering disk (13) is moved past it while rotating. The bottom of the disk is coated with lampblack and oil, and the stylus scribes an analog of sound’s waveforms by cutting away material. An engraved copper plate is made from which pressings are made for sale.”
Emile Berliner (1851–1929) was a German-American inventor, best known for the lateral-cut disc record, also rotary engines and helicopters. Image in the Public Domain via Wikipedia.
Edison’s Theory. Lipton writes, “Edison initially ignored the commercial possibilities of the disk format because the cylinder offered recording and playback at constant linear velocity, whereas the radial velocity of the disk’s grooves decreases with radius, thereby lowering its potential high-frequency response.”
By the way, in a similar argument years later, proponents of 7-in. 45-rpm records touted their “using the sweet spot of the groove, rather than the inner and outer windings of a 12-in. disc.”
Edison’s B2B Focus. Lipton says, “Edison was accustomed to selling-business-to-business and did not have feeling for mass consumer retail, but he hoped the phonograph would be a vehicle for funding his lab operations. However his North American Phonograph Company was unsuccessful in its efforts to persuade businesses to adopt it for dictation.”
“At first,” Lipton continued, “he [Edison] disdained popular entertainment, believing only that highbrow culture like opera was worthy of his attention.”
HIGHBROW? Not that Edison wasn’t above skullduggery. I’m reminded of his squabble with Nikola Tesla over the latter’s alternating current versus Edison’s direct current: the horrific 1903 Edison Manufacturing movie company filming of an elephant electrocuted with AC.
FAKED VOICES. This time around, Lipton notes, “Urged by his colleagues Edison gave in and introduced disk recordings in 1911, and late in 1915 he touted the improvements of his Diamond Disk, promoting it in what he called his tone tests.”
Lipton describes, “The public demonstration consisted of a theatrical comparison of the recording artist and the Diamond Disk, both hidden behind a curtain from the audience’s view. Morton (2004) relates that the artists and disks were hard to tell apart because the devilish Edison used singers who could mimic their recorded voices.”
“Cylinder sales grew between 1900 and 1910,” Lipton recounts, “but except for the dictation application, the cylinder version of the phonograph disappeared from the marketplace.”
Serves Edison right, I say. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024