The Phonautograph the 1857 invention of Frenchman Edouard Léon Scott, 20 years before Edison’s phonograph. Sound collection barrel or resonator Voice enters.

The Phonautographthe 1857 invention of FrenchmanEdouard Léon Scott, 20 years before Edison’s phonograph.

Sound collection barrelor resonator

Voice enters here

Brass tube with membrane

Stylus or needle

Crank cylinder covered with sooty paper

Lee Carleton

MHIS 591

Dr. Bishop

Spring 2008

Edison’s genius is undisputed, but much of his success was due to his skill at self-promotion, showmanship, and the massive financial backing by wealthy investors like Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan who saw the potential for huge profits.

However, Scott’s phonautograph was overlooked primarily because he had no mechanism for replaying the sounds recorded on the sooty paper.

Originally intended for business dictation, Edison’s 1877 phonograph was the first to offer successful playback of sound from grooves inscribed on wax cylinders. A user would speak into the horn, and the needle attached to the diaphragm at the bottom would vibrate and mark the sounds into the surface of the wax cylinder which could then be replayed to reproduce the sound. Edison eventually abandoned the cylinder format to adopt the disk format of the Gramophone company. This form of inscription is similar to that used on the vinyl disks that dominated recorded sound until the advent of magnetic tape and now digital encoding, a completely non-material form of recording sound.

Horizontally mountedbrown wax cylinder

Brady photo of Edison in Washington DC to patent his first phonograph.

Though we celebrate Edison as the holder of over 1000 patents,many do not know of his deafness and his odd method of hearing, nor do we hear much of his early use of the phonograph in a talking doll that was afailure due toits fragile complexity.

Scott may not have been able to play his recordings, but digital technology has vastly expanded our ability to play early unreadable audio recordings

According to a March 27, 2008 New York Times article,“Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison”scholars have recently used digital technologies to play sounds inscribed on sooty paper, a collaborative effort by audio historian David Giovannoni, Patrick Feaster of Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey of Archeophone Records, a company specializing in early sound recordings such as their Grammy nominated album Actionable Offenses, a collection of lusty 19th-century recordings.

Giovannoni holds “theApril 1860 phonautogram, an immaculately preserved Sheet of rag paper 9 inches by 25 inches.”

(note lines inscribed in soot)

The group scanned the sooty paperwith high resolution imaging at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, where they were converted into sound by audio scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. This technology, developed along with the Library of Congress, creates: “high-resolution ‘maps’ of grooved records are played on a computer using a digital stylus.” The 1860 phonautogram was then separated into 16 tracks, then carefully re-assembled with adjustments for variations in the speed of the original hand-cranked recording.

The soot from a lamp, or “lampblack,” covered the paper and became the medium in which the voice patterns were inscribed.

The Phonautograph Recording from 1860 of 'Au Clair de la Lune’ digitally transcribed at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

1931 comparison recording of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’Though the recording is ghostly & somewhat unclear, this new technology promises to sound out many of our earliest recordings whether in soot, wax or acetate.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT…

What are the acoustic differences between sounds created by analog, and sounds created digitally?

Does digital technology mean that materiality is moot?

References

Collins, Theresa M. and Lisa Gitelman. Thomas Edison and Modern America:

A Brief History with Documents. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology

in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. (1986) trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1999.

Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003

Rosen, Jody. “Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison.” New York Times.

March 27, 2008.