The Phonograph and Recording sound..1877-1929....The art, the history, the personalities ....Part 1

This is going to be a hard posting for me,.... for this is the area I have studied for the last 32 years..and I know I can be long winded at times.
But I will try to make a comprehensive history of it all and show some of the lesser known parts of the history. I will in advance offer my sorrows to those who enjoy short posts...This will not be one of them.
I am reminded of a time when I was making a recording of Isaac Stern on cylinder, he asked me how much time he had to speak, I told him 2 minutes..He responded "I can't say hello in 2 minutes"! I understand that, as I cannot either. ......

So here for your information and entertainment is a brief (well I will try) history of recording sound and the history of the phonograph. It will come in several sections as there is a great amount of information here.


The phonograph, the art of recorded sound has been with us for nearly 130 years. Recorded sound is never given a thought as we go through our days and nights listening to it. What would our world be like with out the luxury of recorded sound. ...It would be a bleak and lonely existence.
Yet it has been with us as a commercial product for only 115 years...and even at that not much of a product. It became part of our lives as the new 20th century started....The 20th century saw the rise of mass media as never before....
The headliner of it all was of course the phonograph and recorded sound. It has been our historian, our teacher, our memory, our entertainment, and our companion for all this time. ...So to talk of its history is a very complex thing. ....

The story begins with Thomas Edison in Menlo Park during the summer of 1877. It was on July 18, 1877 that the first attempts to record sound were done by Edison and assistants. Using a telephone mouthpiece with a needle in it they were able to inscribe into wax paper dots and dashes of vibration. This first happened on July 18, 1877. But it was not the first work at recording sound, or the first thoughts of it. There are a number of precursors to it.

The first to mention was the work of Edouard leon Scott de Martinville ( 1817-1879)..He developed what he called a phonautograph in 1857. This machine had a cylinder wrapped in lamped black paper. In front of the cylinder was a horn that ended in hog bristles. The bristles would vibrate and make a mark of the vibration on the lamp blacked paper cylinder. Now it showed vibration from the sound, but there was no desire to reverse the process, nor does there seem to have been any thought of doing so! The phonautograph was a popular device, but it was just to demonstrate the effects of sound...so the interest wore off real quick.

( I am reminded of the glass globes that have a small electric charge that allows the charge to follow your hand...CUTE, BUT BORING IN A FEW MINUTES AND NEVER TOUCHED AGAIN)
That was the fate of the phonautograph. It was the final step from many researchers experiments in the 19th century. Starting with this research were scientists such as J.M.C. Duhamel and Thomas Young would were working on showing the physical evidence of vibration.

The next person in the formation of recorded sound or attempts at it was a Frenchman named Charles Cros (1842-1888)...Who in April of 1877 deposited with the French Academy of Sciences a sealed dated envelope containing a paper which if translated says basically .."A DEVICE TO RECORD AND REPRODUCE THAT PHENOMENA PERCEIVED BY THE EAR" ...A device to record sound!!!....
Now Cros was a teacher and poet, highly emotional, and it seems a tad unstable. His ideas were amazing, but were not workable. But he does have the first plans for a device to record sound...So to that fact he does deserve credit. Sadly, later in life he committed suicide.

Just think if Cros ideas had worked what would be our outlook on recorded sound, and what would it have become....Interesting thoughts, but there can never be an answer.

Now we return to Menlo Park (now Edison) New Jersey in the summer of 1877.
Charles Batchelor and Thomas Edison were playing with telephone mouthpieces. "Batch" as Edison called him wrote in his notes that "Edison amused himself with a telephone mouthpiece for a hour"....In that hour Edison made I am sure a number of noises and probably was yelling into the mouthpiece of the phone. There was small needles on the base of the diaphram of the mouthpiece and as Edison later stated it pricked his finger as he yelled into it. That was an "eureka" moment.....Edison said basically to Batchelor that he felt that if a needle was put into the mouthpiece, that they could inscribe onto a surface the vibrations of sound....and then retrace the sound waves and recreate them!!! What amazing thinking.

Other things had brought Edison to this juncture, such as his work with the "Automatic Telegraph Repeater"...This 2 disc device was made to record telegraph messages. It would indent wax paper discs with the dots and dashes of incoming messages, so they could be listened to later.
One day while working on it Edison said that the turntable moved very fast and the indenting needle ran over the dotes and dashes making odd human like sounds.

It also set his fertile mind in motion. All of this work let to the first recordings of 1877. On July 18-19...Batch and Edison played for hours recording on strips of wax paper and tinfoil such sounds as "Hoo Hoo Hoo", "Haloo" and "Mary had a little lamb". Batchelor said he did not think he could hear anything but Edison said he could hear it faintly.

This led to a lot of work and research and in early December.
Edison gave John Kruesi a sketch and said make it. He would be paid $18.00 for the work. Once it was built, it was tested by Kruesi and Batchelor.

After that Edison got it and made the first official recording!!!...Yes the first official one. There were quite a few before, but Edison was the boss, so he made the first recording ...Remember with Edison ..He never let the truth spoil a good story!!!...So on December 6th 1877 Edison recorded for the first time (officially) "Mary had a little lamb"........The phonograph was born!

End of Part 1 ....and I am only on 1877!!!