Edison Home Phonograph

Sebastian Döring
The Birth of the Phonograph from the Spirit of Signal Transmission

“Do you know Batch, I believe if we put a point on the centre of that diaphragm and talked to it whilst we pulled some of that waxed paper under it so that it could indent it, it would give us back talking when we pulled the paper through the second time.”¹

The phonograph and its ability to write down and reproduce genuine sound vibrations made Thomas Edison a sorcerer. In contrast, the parléophone has been waiting for 130 years to be given physical form. Likewise, the phonautogram has only been playing since 2008 thanks to digital signal processing. Any consideration of the beginnings of the phonograph must start with Menlo Park and Thomas Alva Edison. Over four fifths of Edison’s patent applications in the 18 months before December 1877 concern developments of the telephone or the telegraph. From mid-1873 to the middle of 1876, all 32 patent applications dealt with the telegraph.²

With the development of the railways and the press, with industrialization and the War of Secession, telegram traffic had increased continuously since the 1860s. The technical question of the age was how to increase channel capacity on the existing lines in order to avoid the expensive and complicated laying of new lines. There were two strategies, either an attempt was made to transmit several messages simultaneously on one line, or the speed at which the messages were sent down the channel was increased.³ For the first alternative, Edison constructed the acoustic telegraph with its diplex and duplex telegraphy. The development for the second approach was the recorder-repeater, which derived from the logics of the telegraph network. These devices recorded output signals while the operator transmitted them. In this way, it was in particular possible to send press messages several times along different lines, thereby increasing transmission synchronization together with reproduction speed. A similar principle was to be found in the early telegraphs of the 1830s in simple perforated strips and shift registers. However, in Edison's time, starting from the 1850s, signals in busy telegraph offices were no longer transmitted graphically but instead acoustically by sounders.

Alongside perforated strip recording, Edison began in 1876 to develop devices that initially punched signals onto wax paper strips and later onto discs. Such a device was, for instance the translating embosser.⁴ A reader’s letter to Scientific American in November 1877 is the very first article on Edison’s sound recording. The structure of the apparatus clearly indicated that the method it presented drew its origin from the field of signal transmission. Even though the writer explains that the design presented did not correspond to Edison’s design, the future sorcerer’s drawings in his notebooks show that it reproduced the principle exactly – as also emphasized by the writer. It was not only that all the elements were common components from the fields of telegraphy and telephone, their arrangement was still based on the recorder-repeater. “The speaker in Boston speaks, the engraved strip of paper is the physical result; however, this strip is transported to a second machine that can be connected to the telephone.”⁵ An idea deriving from the relay station, from transmission.

The second machine was not needed for recording. It used the kymographic cylinder-and-stylus principle that Edison had used previously for facsimile telegraphs in 1868, the automatic telegraph in the early 1870s and the electromotograph in the mid-1870s, and that was needed to make the jump from the recorder-repeater to the phonograph.⁶

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