It was December 22nd, 1877, and Thomas Edison, a serious man with the kind of permanent scowl that suggested he didn’t believe in Christmas, a scowl presumedly created by his tendency to constantly be thinking brilliant thoughts, marched into the office of the “Scientific American”, and, more or less silently, placed a contraption down on the table.
If the silence was awkward, it
wouldn’t be for long. For the contraption had a crank, and Thomas turned it. A
voice, extremely crackly but nonetheless legible, emerged from the machine:
"Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?"
They, the assorted reporters in
the room, liked it a lot and no doubt they wanted to hear it again. But alas
they could not. Thomas Edison may have figured out how to transfer sound onto a
piece of tinfoil and play it back, but it could only be played back once. Then
it was ruined.
Still, that was exciting enough!
Sound, something that had been fleeting ever since time began - there for a
milli-second and then… poof! gone!! - could now be captured! Like a painting,
but better! Because, through all the crackle and all of the hiss, the recording
was an exact replica!
Soon Thomas was in Washington, at
the Senate Committee Room of Patents, demonstrating his invention to a crowded
room. President Hayes was so excited when he heard it that he got his wife out
of bed so that she could hear it too! Everybody was agog, and pondering how
this outlandish invention might advance the human race!!
Thomas had some ideas himself –
he came up with a list of ten of them - most of which were as boring as you’d
expect from a man who clearly didn’t know how to have fun. He dreamt that it
would be used for useful functions, making productive people even more
productive. Corporate bosses could use it to dictate letters. Or possibly to
replace letters themselves! People could just send their voice through the
mail!!
And people waited in anticipation
and wondered what amazing developments would occur next. What else – phonograph
related – did Thomas have up his sleeve.
The answer was… not a lot.
Thomas just kind of forgot about
it.
To be fair, he had another
exciting invention on the go: the lightbulb!
Unlike the phonograph, with its
ongoing questions about what exactly it might be used for, the lightbulb was
both exciting and self-evidently useful. It satisfied an immediate need.
A decade passed, and suddenly it
was 1888.
And Thomas realized that it was
time to get back into the phonograph game. For somebody was stealing his
thunder. Somebody else had started producing phonographs and making them better!
That somebody else was Emile Berliner of Berliner Records. Berliner’s
recordings were different from Edison’s. Instead of using cylinders, Emile used
flat disks. Flat disks first of glass, then of zinc, and then finally of
plastic. Emile called them records.
No longer was the phonograph just
a novel invention; the kind of thing that was exciting to everyone who heard
it, but not particularly useful. Now it was a burgeoning industry! With two
well-funded competitors!!
An industry that continued to
benefit from high levels of public interest and astonishment! A machine that
captured sound, which was then sent around the country as though it were
nothing more than canned food? An American public brought up on medicine shows
asked: “could it be magic?”
Media reports did little to
discourage such musings. Some articles even referred to Thomas as “the Wizard
Edison.”
One journalist from the Phonogram
magazine – which described itself as “A Monthly Magazine Dedicated To The
Science of Sound and the Recording Of Speech” - seemed particularly astonished
when granted a tour of the Edison facilities:
“entering the apartment… the
eye beholds a scene so strange and unusual as to impress the beholder with the
momentary delusion that he has penetrated into some chamber of necromancy
belong to mythical history.”
He continues in much the same
vein, talking about “great demijohns”,” innumerable small sized and curious
looking boxes embellished with tiny wheels, shifts and governor balls,” and
“huge funnels with open mouths ready to catch the sounds.”
Consider these huge
sound-catching funnels as reverse phonograph horns. Instead of the music coming
out, the performer stood in front of the horn – sometimes actually placing
their faces inside the horn - and hollered into it, the bellowing noise forcing
its way down through the horn to a vibrating stylus which punched notches into
the grooves. Although the technology would gradually improve, this was more or
less how records would continue to be made all the way through to the
mid-1920s! That is, for pretty much all of this book!
Thomas aka “The Wizard Edison”
had some catching up to do. Now that Emile Berliner was in the race, Thomas had
to perfect his phonograph. He realized that his initial version had some
drawbacks. He admitted as such in an interview with “New York World”, listing
all the problems he needed to solve:
“It weighed 100 lbs, it cost a
mint of money to make, no one but an expert could get anything intelligible
back from it, the record made by the little steel point upon the sheet of
tinfoil lasted only a few times.”
It was, in other words, in its
original form, completely and utterly useless.
So Thomas got to work producing
what he first called the Improved Phonograph, and then, when he was satisfied that
they’d worked all the kinks out, optimistically titled the Perfected Phonograph.
But he still seemed a little unclear as to what the point of his invention was.
He never seemed to realize that its key function would be to capture the sound
of popular culture.
Thomas still thought of the
invention as being mostly a business tool, possibly for Government bureaucrats.
He had big dreams of making stenographers obsolete and was never shy about
admitting to his fantasies of putting an entire industry out of work. “Why talk to a stenographer when you could
talk to a machine?” his advertising asked, adding that a phonograph never made
any radical demands such as asking for an hour off for lunch or being allowed
to go home to sleep at night!
So Thomas set up a company in
Washington, naming it after the District of Columbia. It was the Columbia
Phonograph Company, and it was an instant smash hit. So much so, that
stenographers, the workers the phonograph was replacing, took action and
smashed up the machines.
The
Edison Phonograph Doll was a 22-inch-tall talking doll with a miniature
phonograph stuck inside its tiny metallic chest. Upon the turning of a crank, the
dolls would recite – or more accurately screech out - “Twinkle Twinkle Little
Star”, “Jack And Jill Go Up The Hill”, and a range of other nursery rhymes.
They were recorded by a team of women, seemingly hired for their ability to
sound like especially shrill au pairs, who spent their days sitting at a desk
shouting “Ba Ba Black Sheep” and “Hickory Dickory Dock” into a tiny phonograph
horn.
Advertisements
described them as “The Greatest Wonder Of The Age”, the wonder presumedly being
that they ever reached the production stage. For these dolls, as should have
been obvious from the start, were absolutely terrifying. Particularly the
dolls that shrieked out “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep” complete with an “AMEN!”
at the end. Everything about Edison’s Phonograph Dolls seemed deliberately
designed to give children nightmares!!!
It's
probably fortunate then that the product was a complete flop, with only 500 of
the 2,500 dolls produced being sold. Even disregarding the fact that they were
terrifying, the dolls were also incredibly expensive. Prices started at $10 for
a doll in a plain white nightdress – there was also a $25 version with a fancy
dress - a lot of money given that the recording could only be played a handful
of times before it wore out. Most of the dolls were then returned to the store by
disgruntled parents and their scarred-for-life children, at which point the
tiny phonograph was taken out and they were re-sold as regular dolls.
Edison’s
Phonograph Doll was clearly an idea way before its time (Edison’s Phonograph
Dolls are a 1)
So
if talking dolls were a bust, what other uses might the phonograph have?
How about an aural photo-album,
or as Thomas put it, “The Family Record." A “registry of sayings,
reminiscences, etc, by members of their family in their own voices, and” – here
it takes a sudden turn to the morbid – “of the last words of dying persons.”
The man really was a barrel of laughs.
“The Family Record” concept was more
successful than the talking doll concept, but it didn’t exactly set the world
on fire. Few people were keen on the idea of having their voice recorded, for
the very understandable reason that most people don’t like the sound of their
own voice. They would not have known the sound of their own voice of course
until it was recorded of course, so I suspect it came as a huge and unpleasant
shock.
Thomas himself didn’t even like the
sound of his own voice, but he ended up recording it anyway, largely because he
found the voice of his technician, Walter Miller, to be even more annoying.
Thomas recorded his speaking voice in an open letter to American statesman
James G. Blaine, who had just travelled around Europe. Thomas thought the world
would be interested in hearing him reading a letter to James in which he
describes a possible itinerary for travelling, not just around Europe, but
around the world. He called the recording “Around The World On The Phonograph”
and it’s pretty much just a list of cities and the railways and steamships that
connect them, with some occasional observations such as “we’ll go to Munich, or
Munken, I believe they call it Munken, but that’s not a very nice name to me”
and “in Bombay we’ll probably get cholera and stay in the hospital for two or
three months and have lots of fun.” (“Around The World On The Phonograph” is a
2)
Thomas’ other ideas ranged from
useful - “phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without any
effort on their part”- to largely pointless – “Clocks that should announce in
articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.”
But someone at least was coming up with good ideas. Louis Glass for example, general manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company, put two coin-operator phonographs into the Palais Royale Salon in San Francisco in November 1889, filled with a selection of recordings that customers could choose to hear – listening through a tube not dissimilar to a stethoscope* - for the very reasonable price of a nickel.
He made a $1,000 in nickels in six months, which works out to be 20,000 listens from just two machines. That works out to be, over 50 listens per machine each day! Thus the phonograph parlour was born and soon they could be found all over America! You could find phonograph parlours in train stations, in hotels, in drug stores, at fairs and most of all, in amusement parks and arcades!
A similar service for visual
entertainment was being provided by screen machine parlours. According to
Phonoscope magazine (not to be confused with the above Phonogram magazine, the
Phonoscope magazine was “A Monthly Journal Devoted to Scientific and Amusement
Inventions Appertaining to Sound And Sight”) these short films included “Pier
and Waves”- footage of some waves taken during a storm at Coney Island - which
was apparently “a tremendous hit.” Another popular one was “Monday Morning Wash
Day Scene” which was exactly that. Then there was the very popular “Backyard
Party” showing, and I quote, a “party of colored pickinnies eating watermelon
for a prize.” Thomas Edison made some of these movies himself, including one involving
cats boxing.
The record companies brought much
the same approach to their records. If it could be recorded in audio and people
were willing to pay to hear it, then it just might be a hit in the phonograph
parlours!
And slowly but surely all this
technology began to be used for music.
It wasn’t that Thomas wasn’t
interested in the potential of using the phonograph to record music –
“reproducing music” was the fourth proposed use for the phonograph after “the
teaching of elocution” - it’s just that it didn’t get him as excited as
thinking about a stenographer-free world, or nightmare shrieking dolls.
To the extent that Thomas
considered music as a potential function for the phonograph, it wasn’t popular
music that he was considering. It was classical music. The phonograph would be
a means of educating and introducing culture into the lives of the average
American citizen. People would listen to Mozart and Beethoven, sonatas and
rhapsodies, and through this become more civilized! Although Thomas and John
Sousa were in many ways enemies, they were also, in many ways, very much alike.
If recording anything was
a challenge – as indeed it was – then recording music was even more so. The
band whose frustrating job it was to figure out such technical issues as which
instruments Edison’s contraption was capable of recording, the guineapigs for
all these early musical experiments, was Edward Issler and His Orchestra. It
was a very small orchestra. There was Edward on piano, a cornetist, a flautist
and guy called Van Winkle on violin. Sometimes there was a xylophone player.
Edward was presumably a big fan
of Edison, since he’d written a tune called “Electric Light Quadrille.” Incredibly,
he’d composed it in 1878 before Thomas had even invented the electric light
bulb! A decade or so later, he was recording “Electric Light Quadrille” in Thomas’
magical laboratory, a recording that proved that the piccolo was one of a
handful of instruments that the phonograph was capable of recording. The
piccolo didn’t record well, however. It squeaked and it distorted, and it was
all rather unpleasant. Still, you could hear it. Just being able to hear an
instrument was quite an accomplishment in those days.
The weirdest part of the
recording is the bit in the middle where the music stops for an important
announcement: Issler’s Orchestra is going to do a special show tomorrow evening
to coincide with electric light being used in the hall for the first time! Clearly
nobody expected these recordings to last any longer than about 24 hours. (“Electric
Light Quadrille” is a 2)
Thomas was soon confident enough
that the phonograph had been “perfected” that he released the Concert
Phonograph. And phonograph concerts were indeed held, at least one of which had
200 attendees. Whether it ever managed to work quite as well as in the brochure
– in which a man stands upon the stage with nothing but a phonograph with an extra-long
horn, with hundreds of audience members, including in the galleries, transfixed
– is doubtful.
If Thomas had imagined that the
American people would swarm gratefully towards the alure of classical music
once it was recorded and made available to them in the comfort of their local
phonograph parlour – and later in their own homes - the popularity of
vaudeville, minstrel shows, medicine shows and that man dressing up as a frog, should
have made him think twice. For it was from vaudeville that the aesthetic of pop
would emerge.
The first “hit records”- those
records chosen time and time again in phonograph parlours across the nation - would
reflect a very vaudeville state of mind.
* Up until the mid-1890s,
listening to recordings through tubes was the only option. The recordings
simply were not loud and clear enough to be heard any other way. But slowly the
technology improved. By about the mid-1890s you could listen to some – certainly
not all, but some – recordings just by playing them on your phonograph. If you
had one, and most people still did not. Records that you could listen to
without tubes were so rare that they were promoted with a special “for horn”
designation.
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