Edison, His Life and Inventions

F >> Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin >> Edison, His Life and Inventions


The original Edison phonograph thus built by Kruesi is preserved in the
South Kensington Museum, London. That repository can certainly have no
greater treasure of its kind. But as to its immediate use, the inventor
says: "That morning I took it over to New York and walked into the
office of the Scientific American, went up to Mr. Beach's desk, and said
I had something to show him. He asked what it was. I told him I had a
machine that would record and reproduce the human voice. I opened the
package, set up the machine and recited, 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc.
Then I reproduced it so that it could be heard all over the room. They
kept me at it until the crowd got so great Mr. Beach was afraid the
floor would collapse; and we were compelled to stop. The papers next
morning contained columns. None of the writers seemed to understand how
it was done. I tried to explain, it was so very simple, but the results
were so surprising they made up their minds probably that they never
would understand it--and they didn't.

"I started immediately making several larger and better machines, which
I exhibited at Menlo Park to crowds. The Pennsylvania Railroad ran
special trains. Washington people telegraphed me to come on. I took
a phonograph to Washington and exhibited it in the room of James G.
Blaine's niece (Gail Hamilton); and members of Congress and notable
people of that city came all day long until late in the evening. I made
one break. I recited 'Mary,' etc., and another ditty:

'There was a little girl, who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good she was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid.'

"It will be remembered that Senator Roscoe Conkling, then very prominent,
had a curl of hair on his forehead; and all the caricaturists developed
it abnormally. He was very sensitive about the subject. When he came in
he was introduced; but being rather deaf, I didn't catch his name, but
sat down and started the curl ditty. Everybody tittered, and I was told
that Mr. Conkling was displeased. About 11 o'clock at night word was
received from President Hayes that he would be very much pleased if I
would come up to the White House. I was taken there, and found Mr. Hayes
and several others waiting. Among them I remember Carl Schurz, who was
playing the piano when I entered the room. The exhibition continued till
about 12.30 A.M., when Mrs. Hayes and several other ladies, who had been
induced to get up and dress, appeared. I left at 3.30 A.M.

"For a long time some people thought there was trickery. One morning
at Menlo Park a gentleman came to the laboratory and asked to see the
phonograph. It was Bishop Vincent, who helped Lewis Miller found the
Chautauqua I exhibited it, and then he asked if he could speak a few
words. I put on a fresh foil and told him to go ahead. He commenced to
recite Biblical names with immense rapidity. On reproducing it he said:
'I am satisfied, now. There isn't a man in the United States who could
recite those names with the same rapidity.'"

The phonograph was now fairly launched as a world sensation, and a
reference to the newspapers of 1878 will show the extent to which it and
Edison were themes of universal discussion. Some of the press notices
of the period were most amazing--and amusing. As though the real
achievements of this young man, barely thirty, were not tangible
and solid enough to justify admiration of his genius, the "yellow
journalists" of the period began busily to create an "Edison myth," with
gross absurdities of assertion and attribution from which the modest
subject of it all has not yet ceased to suffer with unthinking people.
A brilliantly vicious example of this method of treatment is to be found
in the Paris Figaro of that year, which under the appropriate title of
"This Astounding Eddison" lay bare before the French public the most
startling revelations as to the inventor's life and character. "It
should be understood," said this journal, "that Mr. Eddison does not
belong to himself. He is the property of the telegraph company which
lodges him in New York at a superb hotel; keeps him on a luxurious
footing, and pays him a formidable salary so as to be the one to know
of and profit by his discoveries. The company has, in the dwelling of
Eddison, men in its employ who do not quit him for a moment, at the
table, on the street, in the laboratory. So that this wretched man,
watched more closely than ever was any malefactor, cannot even give a
moment's thought to his own private affairs without one of his guards
asking him what he is thinking about." This foolish "blague" was
accompanied by a description of Edison's new "aerophone," a steam
machine which carried the voice a distance of one and a half miles. "You
speak to a jet of vapor. A friend previously advised can answer you
by the same method." Nor were American journals backward in this wild
exaggeration.

The furor had its effect in stimulating a desire everywhere on the
part of everybody to see and hear the phonograph. A small commercial
organization was formed to build and exploit the apparatus, and the
shops at Menlo Park laboratory were assisted by the little Bergmann shop
in New York. Offices were taken for the new enterprise at 203 Broadway,
where the Mail and Express building now stands, and where, in a
general way, under the auspices of a talented dwarf, C. A. Cheever, the
embryonic phonograph and the crude telephone shared rooms and expenses.
Gardiner G. Hubbard, father-in-law of Alex. Graham Bell, was one of the
stockholders in the Phonograph Company, which paid Edison $10,000 cash
and a 20 per cent. royalty. This curious partnership was maintained for
some time, even when the Bell Telephone offices were removed to Reade
Street, New York, whither the phonograph went also; and was perhaps
explained by the fact that just then the ability of the phonograph as
a money-maker was much more easily demonstrated than was that of
the telephone, still in its short range magneto stage and awaiting
development with the aid of the carbon transmitter.

The earning capacity of the phonograph then, as largely now, lay in its
exhibition qualities. The royalties from Boston, ever intellectually
awake and ready for something new, ran as high as $1800 a week. In New
York there was a ceaseless demand for it, and with the aid of Hilbourne
L. Roosevelt, a famous organ builder, and uncle of ex-President
Roosevelt, concerts were given at which the phonograph was "featured."
To manage this novel show business the services of James Redpath were
called into requisition with great success. Redpath, famous as a friend
and biographer of John Brown, as a Civil War correspondent, and as
founder of the celebrated Redpath Lyceum Bureau in Boston, divided
the country into territories, each section being leased for exhibition
purposes on a basis of a percentage of the "gate money." To 203
Broadway from all over the Union flocked a swarm of showmen, cranks, and
particularly of old operators, who, the seedier they were in appearance,
the more insistent they were that "Tom" should give them, for the sake
of "Auld lang syne," this chance to make a fortune for him and for
themselves. At the top of the building was a floor on which these
novices were graduated in the use and care of the machine, and then,
with an equipment of tinfoil and other supplies, they were sent out on
the road. It was a diverting experience while it lasted. The excitement
over the phonograph was maintained for many months, until a large
proportion of the inhabitants of the country had seen it; and then the
show receipts declined and dwindled away. Many of the old operators,
taken on out of good-nature, were poor exhibitors and worse accountants,
and at last they and the machines with which they had been intrusted
faded from sight. But in the mean time Edison had learned many lessons
as to this practical side of development that were not forgotten when
the renascence of the phonograph began a few years later, leading up to
the present enormous and steady demand for both machines and records.

It deserves to be pointed out that the phonograph has changed little in
the intervening years from the first crude instruments of 1877-78. It
has simply been refined and made more perfect in a mechanical sense.
Edison was immensely impressed with its possibilities, and greatly
inclined to work upon it, but the coming of the electric light compelled
him to throw all his energies for a time into the vast new field
awaiting conquest. The original phonograph, as briefly noted above, was
rotated by hand, and the cylinder was fed slowly longitudinally by means
of a nut engaging a screw thread on the cylinder shaft. Wrapped
around the cylinder was a sheet of tinfoil, with which engaged a small
chisel-like recording needle, connected adhesively with the centre of
an iron diaphragm. Obviously, as the cylinder was turned, the needle
followed a spiral path whose pitch depended upon that of the feed screw.
Along this path a thread was cut in the cylinder so as to permit the
needle to indent the foil readily as the diaphragm vibrated. By rotating
the cylinder and by causing the diaphragm to vibrate under the effect
of vocal or musical sounds, the needle-like point would form a series
of indentations in the foil corresponding to and characteristic of the
sound-waves. By now engaging the point with the beginning of the grooved
record so formed, and by again rotating the cylinder, the undulations of
the record would cause the needle and its attached diaphragm to vibrate
so as to effect the reproduction. Such an apparatus was necessarily
undeveloped, and was interesting only from a scientific point of view.
It had many mechanical defects which prevented its use as a practical
apparatus. Since the cylinder was rotated by hand, the speed at which
the record was formed would vary considerably, even with the same
manipulator, so that it would have been impossible to record and
reproduce music satisfactorily; in doing which exact uniformity of
speed is essential. The formation of the record in tinfoil was also
objectionable from a practical standpoint, since such a record was faint
and would be substantially obliterated after two or three reproductions.
Furthermore, the foil could not be easily removed from and replaced
upon the instrument, and consequently the reproduction had to follow the
recording immediately, and the successive tinfoils were thrown away. The
instrument was also heavy and bulky. Notwithstanding these objections
the original phonograph created, as already remarked, an enormous
popular excitement, and the exhibitions were considered by many
sceptical persons as nothing more than clever ventriloquism. The
possibilities of the instrument as a commercial apparatus were
recognized from the very first, and some of the fields in which it was
predicted that the phonograph would be used are now fully occupied.
Some have not yet been realized. Writing in 1878 in the North
American-Review, Mr. Edison thus summed up his own ideas as to the
future applications of the new invention:


"Among the many uses to which the phonograph will be applied are the
following:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a
stenographer.

2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort
on their part.

3. The teaching of elocution.

4. Reproduction of music.

5. The 'Family Record'--a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by
members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying
persons.

6. Music-boxes and toys.

7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going
home, going to meals, etc.

8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of
pronouncing.

9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a
teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and
spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in
committing to memory.

10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an
auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records,
instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication."


Of the above fields of usefulness in which it was expected that
the phonograph might be applied, only three have been commercially
realized--namely, the reproduction of musical, including vaudeville or
talking selections, for which purpose a very large proportion of
the phonographs now made is used; the employment of the machine as a
mechanical stenographer, which field has been taken up actively only
within the past few years; and the utilization of the device for the
teaching of languages, for which purpose it has been successfully
employed, for example, by the International Correspondence Schools of
Scranton, Pennsylvania, for several years. The other uses, however,
which were early predicted for the phonograph have not as yet been
worked out practically, although the time seems not far distant when its
general utility will be widely enlarged. Both dolls and clocks have been
made, but thus far the world has not taken them seriously.

The original phonograph, as invented by Edison, remained in its
crude and immature state for almost ten years--still the object of
philosophical interest, and as a convenient text-book illustration of
the effect of sound vibration. It continued to be a theme of curious
interest to the imaginative, and the subject of much fiction, while
its neglected commercial possibilities were still more or less vaguely
referred to. During this period of arrested development, Edison was
continuously working on the invention and commercial exploitation of
the incandescent lamp. In 1887 his time was comparatively free, and the
phonograph was then taken up with renewed energy, and the effort made to
overcome its mechanical defects and to furnish a commercial instrument,
so that its early promise might be realized. The important changes made
from that time up to 1890 converted the phonograph from a scientific toy
into a successful industrial apparatus. The idea of forming the record
on tinfoil had been early abandoned, and in its stead was substituted a
cylinder of wax-like material, in which the record was cut by a minute
chisel-like gouging tool. Such a record or phonogram, as it was then
called, could be removed from the machine or replaced at any time, many
reproductions could be obtained without wearing out the record, and
whenever desired the record could be shaved off by a turning-tool so
as to present a fresh surface on which a new record could be formed,
something like an ancient palimpsest. A wax cylinder having walls less
than one-quarter of an inch in thickness could be used for receiving a
large number of records, since the maximum depth of the record groove is
hardly ever greater than one one-thousandth of an inch. Later on, and
as the crowning achievement in the phonograph field, from a commercial
point of view, came the duplication of records to the extent of many
thousands from a single "master." This work was actively developed
between the years 1890 and 1898, and its difficulties may be appreciated
when the problem is stated; the copying from a single master of many
millions of excessively minute sound-waves having a maximum width of one
hundredth of an inch, and a maximum depth of one thousandth of an
inch, or less than the thickness of a sheet of tissue-paper. Among the
interesting developments of this process was the coating of the original
or master record with a homogeneous film of gold so thin that three
hundred thousand of these piled one on top of the other would present a
thickness of only one inch!

Another important change was in the nature of a reversal of the original
arrangement, the cylinder or mandrel carrying the record being mounted
in fixed bearings, and the recording or reproducing device being fed
lengthwise, like the cutting-tool of a lathe, as the blank or record was
rotated. It was early recognized that a single needle for forming the
record and the reproduction therefrom was an undesirable arrangement,
since the formation of the record required a very sharp cutting-tool,
while satisfactory and repeated reproduction suggested the use of a
stylus which would result in the minimum wear. After many experiments
and the production of a number of types of machines, the present
recorders and reproducers were evolved, the former consisting of a
very small cylindrical gouging tool having a diameter of about forty
thousandths of an inch, and the latter a ball or button-shaped stylus
with a diameter of about thirty-five thousandths of an inch. By using
an incisor of this sort, the record is formed of a series of connected
gouges with rounded sides, varying in depth and width, and with which
the reproducer automatically engages and maintains its engagement.
Another difficulty encountered in the commercial development of the
phonograph was the adjustment of the recording stylus so as to enter the
wax-like surface to a very slight depth, and of the reproducer so as
to engage exactly the record when formed. The earlier types of machines
were provided with separate screws for effecting these adjustments;
but considerable skill was required to obtain good results, and great
difficulty was experienced in meeting the variations in the wax-like
cylinders, due to the warping under atmospheric changes. Consequently,
with the early types of commercial phonographs, it was first necessary
to shave off the blank accurately before a record was formed thereon,
in order that an absolutely true surface might be presented. To overcome
these troubles, the very ingenious suggestion was then made and adopted,
of connecting the recording and reproducing styluses to their respective
diaphragms through the instrumentality of a compensating weight,
which acted practically as a fixed support under the very rapid sound
vibrations, but which yielded readily to distortions or variations
in the wax-like cylinders. By reason of this improvement, it became
possible to do away with all adjustments, the mass of the compensating
weight causing the recorder to engage the blank automatically to the
required depth, and to maintain the reproducing stylus always with the
desired pressure on the record when formed. These automatic adjustments
were maintained even though the blank or record might be so much out of
true as an eighth of an inch, equal to more than two hundred times the
maximum depth of the record groove.

Another improvement that followed along the lines adopted by Edison for
the commercial development of the phonograph was making the recording
and reproducing styluses of sapphire, an extremely hard, non-oxidizable
jewel, so that those tiny instruments would always retain their true
form and effectively resist wear. Of course, in this work many other
things were done that may still be found on the perfected phonograph
as it stands to-day, and many other suggestions were made which were
contemporaneously adopted, but which were later abandoned. For the
curious-minded, reference is made to the records in the Patent Office,
which will show that up to 1893 Edison had obtained upward of sixty-five
patents in this art, from which his line of thought can be very closely
traced. The phonograph of to-day, except for the perfection of its
mechanical features, in its beauty of manufacture and design, and in
small details, may be considered identical with the machine of 1889,
with the exception that with the latter the rotation of the record
cylinder was effected by an electric motor.

Its essential use as then contemplated was as a substitute for
stenographers, and the most extravagant fancies were indulged in as to
utility in that field. To exploit the device commercially, the patents
were sold to Philadelphia capitalists, who organized the North American
Phonograph Company, through which leases for limited periods were
granted to local companies doing business in special territories,
generally within the confines of a single State. Under that plan,
resembling the methods of 1878, the machines and blank cylinders were
manufactured by the Edison Phonograph Works, which still retains its
factories at Orange, New Jersey. The marketing enterprise was early
doomed to failure, principally because the instruments were not well
understood, and did not possess the necessary refinements that would fit
them for the special field in which they were to be used. At first the
instruments were leased; but it was found that the leases were seldom
renewed. Efforts were then made to sell them, but the prices were
high--from $100 to $150. In the midst of these difficulties, the chief
promoter of the enterprise, Mr. Lippincott, died; and it was soon found
that the roseate dreams of success entertained by the sanguine promoters
were not to be realized. The North American Phonograph Company failed,
its principal creditor being Mr. Edison, who, having acquired the assets
of the defunct concern, organized the National Phonograph Company, to
which he turned over the patents; and with characteristic energy he
attempted again to build up a business with which his favorite and, to
him, most interesting invention might be successfully identified. The
National Phonograph Company from the very start determined to retire at
least temporarily from the field of stenographic use, and to exploit the
phonograph for musical purposes as a competitor of the music-box. Hence
it was necessary that for such work the relatively heavy and expensive
electric motor should be discarded, and a simple spring motor
constructed with a sufficiently sensitive governor to permit accurate
musical reproduction. Such a motor was designed, and is now used on
all phonographs except on such special instruments as may be made with
electric motors, as well as on the successful apparatus that has more
recently been designed and introduced for stenographic use. Improved
factory facilities were introduced; new tools were made, and various
types of machines were designed so that phonographs can now be bought at
prices ranging from $10 to $200. Even with the changes which were thus
made in the two machines, the work of developing the business was slow,
as a demand had to be created; and the early prejudice of the public
against the phonograph, due to its failure as a stenographic apparatus,
had to be overcome. The story of the phonograph as an industrial
enterprise, from this point of departure, is itself full of interest,
but embraces so many details that it is necessarily given in a separate
later chapter. We must return to the days of 1878, when Edison, with at
least three first-class inventions to his credit--the quadruplex, the
carbon telephone, and the phonograph--had become a man of mark and a
"world character."

The invention of the phonograph was immediately followed, as usual, by
the appearance of several other incidental and auxiliary devices, some
patented, and others remaining simply the application of the
principles of apparatus that had been worked out. One of these was the
telephonograph, a combination of a telephone at a distant station with a
phonograph. The diaphragm of the phonograph mouthpiece is actuated by an
electromagnet in the same way as that of an ordinary telephone receiver,
and in this manner a record of the message spoken from a distance can
be obtained and turned into sound at will. Evidently such a process
is reversible, and the phonograph can send a message to the distant
receiver.

This idea was brilliantly demonstrated in practice in February, 1889, by
Mr. W. J. Hammer, one of Edison's earliest and most capable associates,
who carried on telephonographic communication between New York and an
audience in Philadelphia. The record made in New York on the Edison
phonograph was repeated into an Edison carbon transmitter, sent over one
hundred and three miles of circuit, including six miles of underground
cable; received by an Edison motograph; repeated by that on to a
phonograph; transferred from the phonograph to an Edison carbon
transmitter, and by that delivered to the Edison motograph receiver in
the enthusiastic lecture-hall, where every one could hear each sound
and syllable distinctly. In real practice this spectacular playing with
sound vibrations, as if they were lacrosse balls to toss around between
the goals, could be materially simplified.

The modern megaphone, now used universally in making announcements
to large crowds, particularly at sporting events, is also due to this
period as a perfection by Edison of many antecedent devices going back,
perhaps, much further than the legendary funnels through which Alexander
the Great is said to have sent commands to his outlying forces. The
improved Edison megaphone for long-distance work comprised two horns of
wood or metal about six feet long, tapering from a diameter of two feet
six inches at the mouth to a small aperture provided with ear-tubes.
These converging horns or funnels, with a large speaking-trumpet in
between them, are mounted on a tripod, and the megaphone is complete.
Conversation can be carried on with this megaphone at a distance of
over two miles, as with a ship or the balloon. The modern megaphone
now employs the receiver form thus introduced as its very effective
transmitter, with which the old-fashioned speaking-trumpet cannot
possibly compete; and the word "megaphone" is universally applied to the
single, side-flaring horn.