1878 first-ever captured Edison audio recording unveiled | Fox News 1878 first-ever captured Edison audio recording unveiled Published October 25, 2012 SCHENECTADY, N.Y. – It's scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world's first recorded blooper. The modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a musical performance, thanks to digital advances that allowed the sound to be transferred from flimsy tinfoil to computer. The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878. At a time when music lovers can carry thousands of digital songs on a player the size of a pack of gum, Edison's tinfoil playback seems prehistoric. But that dinosaur opens a key window into the development of recorded sound. "In the history of recorded sound that's still playable, this is about as far back as we can go," said John Schneiter, a trustee at the Museum of Innovation and Science, where it will be played Thursday night in the city where Edison helped found the General Electric Co.

The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man's voice reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard." The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme. "Look at me; I don't know the song," he says. When the recording is played using modern technology during a presentation Thursday at a nearby theater, it likely will be the first time it has been played at a public event since it was created during an Edison phonograph demonstration held June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, museum officials said. The recording was made on a sheet of tinfoil, 5 inches wide by 15 inches long, placed on the cylinder of the phonograph Edison invented in 1877 and began selling the following year. A hand crank turned the cylinder under a stylus that would move up and down over the foil, recording the sound waves created by the operator's voice.

The stylus would eventually tear the foil after just a few playbacks, and the person demonstrating the technology would typically tear up the tinfoil and hand the pieces out as souvenirs, according to museum curator Chris Hunter. Popping noises heard on this recording are likely from scars left from where the foil was folded up for more than a century. "Realistically, once you played it a couple of times, the stylus would tear through it and destroy it," he said. Only a handful of the tinfoil recording sheets are known to known to survive, and of those, only two are playable: the Schenectady museum's and an 1880 recording owned by The Henry Ford museum in Michigan. Hunter said he was able to determine just this week that the man's voice on the museum's 1878 tinfoil recording is believed to be that of Thomas Mason, a St. Louis newspaper political writer who also went by the pen name I.X. Peck. Edison company records show that one of his newly invented tinfoil phonographs, serial No.

8, was sold to Mason for $95.50 in April 1878, and a search of old newspapers revealed a listing for a public phonograph program being offered by Peck on June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, the curator said. A woman's voice says the words "Old Mother Hubbard," but her identity remains a mystery, he said. Three weeks after making the recording, Mason died of sunstroke, Hunter said. A Connecticut woman donated the tinfoil to the Schenectady museum in 1978 for an exhibit on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Edison company that later merged with another to form GE. The woman's father had been an antiques dealer in the Midwest and counted the item among his favorites, Hunter said. In July, Hunter brought the Edison tinfoil recording to California's Berkeley Lab, where researchers such as Carl Haber have had success in recent years restoring some of the earliest audio recordings.

Haber's projects include recovering a snippet of a folk song recorded a capella in 1860 on paper by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, a French printer credited with inventing the earliest known sound recording device. Haber and his team used optical scanning technology to replicate the action of the phonograph's stylus, reading the grooves in the foil and creating a 3D image, which was then analyzed by a computer program that recovered the original recorded sound. The achievement restores a vital link in the evolution of recorded sound, Haber said. The artifact represents Edison's first step in his efforts to record sound and have the capability to play it back, even if it was just once or twice, he said. "It really completes a technology story," Haber said. "He was on the right track from the get-go to record and play it back." Advertisement 1877: First Phonograph | History of Innovation History of Innovation Location: United States of America By: Thomas A. Edison Thomas Edison, after attempting to improve the telegraph, invented the phonograph in 1877.

Edison was interested in creating a device that would store telegraphic messages via imprints on paper to be reused telegraphically time after time. The phonograph, also known as a gramophone, is a machine that records and plays back recorded sounds through the use of two diaphragms and two styluses. When a person talks into the mouthpiece, the sounds are indented by a stylus on a metal tin-foiled cylinder as vertical wave patterns. The first words to ever be recorded and played back by a phonograph were: “Mary had a little lamb”, a well known nursery rhyme. The invention of the phonograph received much public attention; many American newspapers and magazines featured the phonograph, increasing its popularity. Edison hoped that the phonograph would be used for the following purposes among others: teach elocution, reproduce music, time-announcing clocks, preserve languages and their pronunciation, and clarify lessons. The phonograph was important because it allowed messages to be recorded and be replayed as many times possible afterwards, at the discretion of the users. Additionally, it led to the development of improved sound-reproducing machines, making the recording and distribution of music possible.

Hear Thomas Edison's earliest known recording from 1878 for the first time (audio) | 89.3 KPCC Hear Thomas Edison's earliest known recording from 1878 for the first time (audio) Optical Imaging Study of the 1878 St. Louis Edison Tinfoil Recording Image via Websnap08.lbl.gov Share on Facebook One of the oldest audio recordings of a musical performance — and possibly the oldest ever of an American voice — has been restored and is being heard for the first time publicly since it was recorded 134 years ago. The audio, recorded on tin foil by Thomas Edison using one of his early phonographs, was made during a 1878 museum demonstration in St. Louis. The audio includes a man and a woman reciting nursery rhymes, bursts of laughter, and a cornet solo (listen to the talking tin foil audio clips below). Dense with diagrams and scientific method, the project summary also provides insight into the mind-melting marvel of hearing a machine talk back for the first time. In his writings, Edison detailed a personal account of the invention: I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface.

Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm ... Kruesi (the machinist), when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Despite Edison's above account of shouting a nursery rhyme on a recording, it's somewhat unclear if it's his voice on this recording. Experts believe the voice is actually that of political writer Thomas Mason. Restoration for the optical imaging study required specialized tools developed at the University of California Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the Library of Congress (watch videos below to see the restoration in action). AUDIO Hear Thomas Edison's talking tin foil for the first time since 1878. KPCC SEGMENT KPCC's Shirley Jahad speaks with restoration experts about how the sound was brought back to life.

VIDEOS Watch the machines in action. You care about today's news.And you're not alone. Join others who support independent journalism. Media Art Net | Edison, Thomas Alva: Phonograph Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards . Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers . Your browser does not support the video tag. Thomas Alva Edison «Mary had a little Lamb» Edison’s famous first words to be recorded onto the wax cylinder were taken from the nursery rhyme ‹Mary Had A Little Lamb›. In 1877 this caused a sensation in the editorial office of the ‹Scientific American›. The original version was lost, and the version offered here is the recording Edison made again for nostalgic reasons in the year 1927. Project MUSE - Canned Literature: The Book after Edison Canned Literature: The Book after Edison In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Canned Literature Matthew Rubery (bio) The history of recorded sound begins in verse.

Thomas Edison announced his plans to mechanically reproduce the human voice in a letter to Scientific American published on November 17, 1877. 1 Three weeks later, Edison’s associates assembled a simple device on which Edison recorded “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Whatever disagreements exist among historians as to the exact events of that day, there is no disputing that the words of this nursery rhyme were among the first spoken by the phonograph. 2 Their fame makes it all the more surprising that histories of the phonograph have had so little to say about the prominence of the spoken word at its initial demonstrations in America and Europe. 3 No recordings were made of the exhibitions, unfortunately, but press reports enable us to reconstruct the sequence of events at many of them. 4 A typical demonstration began with an explanation of how the machine worked, followed by displays of recording and playback ( Figure 1 ). The program opened with a greeting from the phonograph (“The phonograph presents its compliments to the audience”) before moving on to some combination of recitations, songs, music, and random noises.

Members of the audience were then invited to speak their own effusions into the phonograph, and the exhibitor sometimes brought the evening to a close by handing out torn-off slips of tinfoil as souvenirs. At nearly all of the demonstrations, the spoken word played a prominent role in showcasing recorded sound to audiences who had never before heard speech mechanically reproduced. Historians are only telling half the story when they describe the talking machine as if it were a singing machine. 5 Recent scholarship has begun to correct this imbalance by showing how the discourse of recorded sound developed in relation to print media. 6 A witness to one of the initial phonograph demonstrations posed the question on every reader’s mind: was it possible to record a novel “so that books can be procured in this form and by being placed on the Phonograph the entire story be told to the listening ear?” 7 Unfortunately, the wish was [End Page 215] years ahead of the technology. There was little hope of recording an entire novel in 1878 since tinfoil cylinders were restricted in playing time to a couple of minutes and were extremely difficult to reproduce.

8 The first recordings that might be thought of as literary were not made until a decade later, when Edison’s improved phonograph made it possible to record the poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning; recordings of full-length books had to wait until philanthropic initiatives for blind people in the 1930s. 9 However, it is a mistake to think that the phonograph’s limitations in its own time constrained speculation about its future. Even if the inaugural recordings consisted of nursery rhymes and snippets of verse, the advent of phonograph technology made it possible to conceive of a recorded book fifty years in advance of its actual completion. Click for larger view Thomas Edison - Exodus Books Just for Fun Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American scientist and inventor known for creating the lightbulb among his many inventions. His parents were Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. and Nancy Matthews Elliott. Thomas was their seventh child. Edison married twice and had six children altogether, three from each wife. His inventions spanned a wide aray between industrial, communications, and even business technology.

These inventions included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, the lightbulb, recorded music and motion pictures. The phonograph was the first machine that could record the sound of someone's voice and play it back. In 1877, Edison recorded the first words on a piece of tin foil. He recited the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and the phonograph played the words back to him. This was invented by a man whose hearing was so poor that he thought of himself as "deaf"! Thomas Edison died on Oct. 18th, 1931 in New Jersey at the age of 84 years. People often say Edison was a genius. He answered, "Genius is hard work, stick-to-it-iveness, and common sense," or "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Did you find this review helpful? Related Links Tinfoil Phonograph - The Edison Papers Search (Main) Folders & Volumes Single Document Series Notes Tinfoil Phonograph In July 1877, while developing his telephone transmitter, Edison conceived the idea of recording and playing back telephone messages.

After experimenting with a telephone "diaphragm having an embossing point & held against paraffin paper moving rapidly," he found that the sound "vibrations are indented nicely" and concluded "there's no doubt that I shall be able to store up & reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly." Edison periodically returned to this idea, and by the end of November, he had developed a basic design. The first phonograph consisted of grooved cylinder mounted on a long shaft with a screw pitch of ten threads per inch and turned by a hand crank. Instead of paraffined paper, Edison used a piece of tin foil wrapped around the cylinder as a recording surface. The first phonograph had separate recording and playback mechanisms, but later designs combined them into a single unit. Satisfied with his design, Edison had machinist John Kruesi construct the phonograph during the first week of December 1877.

Edison later recounted that when he explained to Kruesi that the machine was going to record and playback speech "he thought it absurd." When Kruesi finished making the phonograph Edison put on the tin foil and then recorded the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb"; Edison's daughter Marion was at the time nearly five years old and his eldest son was almost two. Edison then "adjusted the reproducer and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I never was so taken back in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time." Similar astonishment occurred the following day when Edison exhibited the new invention at the offices on Scientific American. The phonograph was a marvel that amazed the scientific and technical community as well as the public because of its utter simplicity. Acoustics was a subject of much scientific interest during the nineteenth century. Scientists working to duplicate the variety of tones and overtones necessary to reproduce human speech had devised complex mechanisms for this purpose. Furthermore, they recognized the ear as one of the most complicated parts of human anatomy. As a result, the simple mechanism and operation of the phonograph seemed astounding and even prompted some initial skepticism.

Edison even received a letter from one professor, who called the "idea of a talking machine ridiculous" and advised Edison to protect his "good reputation as an inventor among scientific men." But the phonograph soon became a subject of considerable interest to the scientific community, which used it to investigate the science of acoustics, and Edison was, of course, celebrated for his contribution to science. The phonograph also made Edison's reputation as the "Inventor of the Age" and led to his most famous nickname "The Wizard of Menlo Park." Newspaper reporters flocked to the Menlo Park Laboratory to see the new invention and to interview Edison. A constant stream of articles about the inventor, including anecdotes and biographical sketches, led to his becoming one of the most famous men in the world as the phonograph was exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. However, the tinfoil recordings were never entirely satisfactory, and it was another ten years before Edison produced a more commercial design using wax cylinders for recording.

To see and hear a modern recreation of the first recording performed by Robert Rosenberg, former director of the Edison Papers, at the Lemelson Center (Smithsonian Institution) in 1997 The History of the Phonograph By Adam Kennedy, amk5248@psu.edu In the late 1870’s, as Thomas Edison was in his heyday of creating and improving on communications devices, he was struck with the dilemma of making the telephone the main medium of communication. The problem was however, the telegraph’s message could quickly be recorded and sent out to a recipient in a telegram. With a phone call, the message had to be listened to by a person then written down and sent out. Edison theorized that having a device record the voice on the telephone, and then used to playback later would be the ultimate answer. Enter the Edison Phonograph. The Edison Phonograph While working with the telephone and telegraph, Edison was using an electrical diaphragm to make a voice into an electrical signal and a stylus connected to a telegraph to make dots and dashes on paper to independently record telegraph signals.

After working with the two for some period of time in 1877, Edison had the idea to converge the two together and attempt to make a machine that records voice. He took the stylus from the telegraph and attached it to a diaphragm connected to a telephone. Edison spoke into his new contraption and the stylus clearly made an indentation on the paper when he spoke. When he played it back however, there was just some static noise. This was headway though, Edison proved that his voice could be recorded, it just needed modifications and more research, the invention at this time was rough and spur of the moment after all. Edison and his associates went back to the drawing board for several more months to perfect the phonograph. On December 3 1877, Edison had done it, he had come up with plans for the machine and had it assembled in his workshop. This time, important modifications were made. Instead of using paper as a medium of recording, he used tin foil to record the sound waves. Also, the tin foil was made into a cylinder; the cylinder would rotate around in a circle with a stylus touching it.

When sound waves vibrated, the stylus was touching the tin cylinder, it would indent the tin making a perfect copy of the sound. How the phonograph works The first audio recorded and played back was Edison saying the nursery rhyme, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Edison soon got bored with the invention and did not do much with it for the next several years. Other inventers soon discovered the great invention and began to work with it themselves. In 1886, one of these men was a man by the name of Charles Sumner Tainter of the Alexander Graham Bell Company. He took the idea of the tin cylinder and changed it into wax and used a less rigid stylus, the result was an improved phonograph with better quality of playback. They called it the graphophone. Once Edison was done making his new invention, the light bulb, his competitive personality brought him back to the phonograph. He wanted to make his phonograph better than the Bell Company’s graphophone. When he was done with his improvements, a businessman, Jesse H. Lippincott, bought all of the phonograph companies including Edison’s, and attempted to make a monopoly out of the phonograph industry.

Lippincott would only rent the machines out to businesses and not sell them. This was greatly opposed and his idea to not go over to well, he became sick in 1890 and Edison took control of the company. Once Edison had control, he ended the rental policy and began to sell the phonographs. In 1894, Edison made a brilliant business move, he declared bankruptcy of the North American Phonograph company of which he did not own, and then bought the company back. With the company now under his control, he made a step in the direction that we are all thankful for today, home entertainment. Edison began to market the phonograph to standard people for entertainment. The price of the device fell dramatically and was more available to the consumer. Edison cylinders typically played music, but it was not uncommon for the cylinders to be comic shorts. There were two main problems with Edison cylinders, first of all, they only played for about two minutes and there was no means of mass reproduction for the cylinders. That means that if a singer is performing a song for example, they can only record a few cylinders at a time. Therefore, the singer had to sing the song numerous times just to make enough cylinders to sell.

The problem was solved in 1901 when Edison came up was a method to mass-produce the wax cylinders. A master cylinder would be made from gold, and then the gold master would be used as a mold to make the duplicate wax cylinders. The benefits of mass production were quite evident in that the price of wax cylinders fell to about 35 cents apiece. As time went on, competitors began to use circular discs instead of cylinders, they provided more playback time, however the sound quality was not as good, it was a give take situation. Edison opposed the idea of the disc, however almost everyone else switched to the disc because of the longer playtime, which was seen as to be more important. Eventually in 1913 Edison gave in and started to produce what we now know as records. From here on, the phonograph turns into what we see it as today, early models were crank operated and had a large horn as a speaker, they were knows as victrolas. The now “record player,” would shape the century providing musical entertainment to anyone who wanted it. The phonograph played a role in toys, time announcing clocks, books for the blind, and family records.

Additionally, the phonograph made talking movies possible, Edison was the frontrunner of the cinema and it could not have been possible if he had not made the phonograph years earlier. Edison’s phonograph played an integral role in World War I. He made a special machine the soldiers could take with them to the battlefront to help raise moral and remind them of home. Phonograph cylinders The world would be a different place today if it were not for the invention of the phonograph, music is an essential part of people’s lives around the globe; it is a way of expression and a reflection of oneself. The ability to playback music shaped all the generations of the twentieth century, every teenager’s life revolves around music. The phonograph played a gigantic role on the transmission of ideas from one place to another. Especially with the usage of the cinema, news could be broadcast, and with the help of the phonograph, educate cultures about one another. Without the phonograph, the culture of the world, without a doubt, would be completely different.

Sources: History of the Cylinder Phonograph - Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies | Digital Collections | Library of Congress Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies History of the Cylinder Phonograph Phonograph Catalog/Advertisement: "I want a phonograph in every home...". The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas Edison's work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly. This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback.

When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kruesi, to build, which Kruesi supposedly did within 30 hours. Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, "Mary had a little lamb." To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him. Although it was later stated that the date for this event was on August 12, 1877, some historians believe that it probably happened several months later, since Edison did not file for a patent until December 24, 1877. Also, the diary of one of Edison's aides, Charles Batchelor, seems to confirm that the phonograph was not constructed until December 4, and finished two days later. The patent on the phonograph was issued on February 19, 1878. The invention was highly original. The only other recorded evidence of such an invention was in a paper by French scientist Charles Cros, written on April 18, 1877.

There were some differences, however, between the two men's ideas, and Cros's work remained only a theory, since he did not produce a working model of it. Original Edison Tin Foil Phonograph. Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site. Edison took his new invention to the offices of Scientific American in New York City and showed it to staff there. As the December 22, 1877, issue reported, "Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night." Interest was great, and the invention was reported in several New York newspapers, and later in other American newspapers and magazines. The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was established on January 24, 1878, to exploit the new machine by exhibiting it. Edison received $10,000 for the manufacturing and sales rights and 20% of the profits.

As a novelty, the machine was an instant success, but was difficult to operate except by experts, and the tin foil would last for only a few playings. Ever practical and visionary, Edison offered the following possible future uses for the phonograph in North American Review in June 1878: Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part. The teaching of elocution. Reproduction of music. 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. Music-boxes and toys. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanantions 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.

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. Eventually, the novelty of the invention wore off for the public, and Edison did no further work on the phonograph for a while, concentrating instead on inventing the incadescent light bulb. In the void left by Edison, others moved forward to improve the phonograph. In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell won the Volta Prize of $10,000 from the French government for his invention of the telephone. Bell used his winnings to set up a laboratory to further electrical and acoustical research, working with his cousin Chichester A. Bell, a chemical engineer, and Charles Sumner Tainter, a scientist and instrument maker. They made some improvements on Edison's invention, chiefly by using wax in the place of tin foil and a floating stylus instead of a rigid needle which would incise, rather than indent, the cylinder. A patent was awarded to C. Bell and Tainter on May 4, 1886. The machine was exhibited to the public as the graphophone.

Bell and Tainter had representatives approach Edison to discuss a possible collaboration on the machine, but Edison refused and determined to improve the phonograph himself. At this point, he had succeeded in making the incandescent lamp and could now resume his work on the phonograph. His initial work, though, closely followed the improvements made by Bell and Tainter, especially in its use of wax cylinders, and was called the New Phonograph. The Edison Phonograph Company was formed on October 8, 1887, to market Edison's machine. He introduced the Improved Phonograph by May of 1888, shortly followed by the Perfected Phonograph. The first wax cylinders Edison used were white and made of ceresin, beeswax, and stearic wax. Edison Home Phonograph Businessman Jesse H. Lippincott assumed control of the phonograph companies by becoming sole licensee of the American Graphophone Company and by purchasing the Edison Phonograph Company from Edison. In an arrangement which eventually included most other phonograph makers as well, he formed the North American Phonograph Company on July 14, 1888.

Lippincott saw the potential use of the phonograph only in the business field and leased the phonographs as office dictating machines to various member companies which each had its own sales territory. Unfortunately, this business did not prove to be very profitable, receiving significant opposition from stenographers. Meanwhile, the Edison Factory produced talking dolls in 1890 for the Edison Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Co. The dolls contained tiny wax cylinders. Edison's relationship with the company ended in March of 1891, and the dolls are very rare today. The Edison Phonograph Works also produced musical cylinders for coin-slot phonographs which some of the subsidiary companies had started to use. These proto-"jukeboxes" were a development which pointed to the future of phonographs as entertainment machines. In the fall of 1890, Lippincott fell ill and lost control of the North American Phonograph Co. to Edison, who was its principal creditor. Edison changed the policy of rentals to outright sales of the machines, but changed little else.

Edison increased the entertainment offerings on his cylinders, which by 1892 were made of a wax known among collectors today as "brown wax." Although called by this name, the cylinders could range in color from off-white to light tan to dark brown. An announcement at the beginning of the cylinder would typically indicate the title, artist, and company. Advertisement for the Edison New Standard Phongraph, in Harper's, September 1898. In 1894, Edison declared bankruptcy for the North American Phonograph Company, a move that enabled him to buy back the rights to his invention. It took two years for the bankruptcy affairs to be settled before Edison could move ahead with marketing his invention. The Edison Spring Motor Phonograph appeared in 1895, even though technically Edison was not allowed to sell phonographs at this time because of the bankruptcy agreement. In January 1896, he started the National Phonograph Company which would manufacture phonographs for home entertainment use. Within three years, branches of the company were located in Europe.

Under the aegis of the company, he announced the Spring Motor Phonograph in 1896, followed by the Edison Home Phonograph, and he began the commercial issue of cylinders under the new company's label. A year later, the Edison Standard Phonograph was manufactured, and then exhibited in the press in 1898. This was the first phonograph to carry the Edison trademark design. Prices for the phonographs had significantly diminished from its early days of $150 (in 1891) down to $20 for the Standard model and $7.50 for a model known as the Gem, introduced in 1899. Standard-sized cylinders, which tended to be 4.25" long and 2.1875" in diameter, were 50 cents each and typically played at 120 r.p.m. A variety of selections were featured on the cylinders, including marches, sentimental ballads, coon songs, hymns, comic monologues and descriptive specialities, which offered sound reenactments of events. The early cylinders had two significant problems. The first was the short length of the cylinders, only 2 minutes.

This necessarily narrowed the field of what could be recorded. The second problem was that no mass method of duplicating cylinders existed. Most often, performers had to repeat their performances when recording in order to amass a quantity of cylinders. This was not only time-consuming, but costly. The Edison Concert Phonograph, which had a louder sound and a larger cylinder measuring 4.25" long and 5" in diameter, was introduced in 1899, retailing for $125 and the large cylinders for $4. The Concert Phonograph did not sell well, and prices for it and its cylinders were dramatically reduced. Their production ceased in 1912. A process for mass-producing duplicate wax cylinders was put into effect in 1901. The cylinders were molded, rather than engraved by a stylus, and a harder wax was used. The process was referred to as Gold Moulded, because of a gold vapor given off by gold electrodes used in the process. Sub-masters were created from the gold master, and the cylinders were made from these molds. From a single mold, 120 to 150 cylinders could be produced every day.

The new wax used was black in color, and the cylinders were initially called New High Speed Hard Wax Moulded Records until the name was changed to Gold Moulded. By mid-1904, the savings in mass duplication was reflected in the price for cylinders which had been lowered to 35 cents each. Beveled ends were made on the cylinders to accommodate titles. A new business phonograph was introduced in 1905. Similar to a standard phonograph, it had alterations to the reproducer and mandrel. The early machines were difficult to use, and their fragility made them prone to failure. Even though improvements were made to the machine over the years, they still cost more than the popular, inexpensive Dictaphones put out by Columbia. Electrical motors and controls were later added to the Edison business machine, which improved their performance. (Some Edison phonographs made before 1895 also had electric motors, until they were replaced by spring motors.) At this point, the Edison business phonograph became a dictating system. Three machines were used: the executive dictating machine, the secretarial machine for transcribing, and a shaving machine used to recycle used cylinders.

This system can be seen in the Edison advertising film, The Stenographer's Friend , filmed in 1910. An improved machine, the Ediphone, was introduced in 1916 and steadily grew in sales after World War I and into the 1920's. Catalog for Edison moulded cylinder records, March 1903. In terms of playing time, the 2-minute wax cylinder could not compete well against competitors' discs, which could offer up to four minutes. In response, the Amberol Record was presented in November 1908, which had finer grooves than the two-minute cylinders, and thus, could last as long as 4 minutes. The two-minute cylinders were then referred to in the future as Edison Two-Minute Records, and then later as Edison Standard Records. In 1909, a series of Grand Opera Amberols (a continuation of the two-minute Grand Opera Cylinders introduced in 1906) was put on the market to attract the higher-class clientele, but these did not prove successful.

The Amberola I phonograph was introduced in 1909, a floor-model luxury machine with high-quality performance, and was supposed to compete with the Victrola and Grafonola. In 1910, the company was reorganized into Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Frank L. Dyer was initially president, then Edison served as president from December 1912 until August 1926, when his son, Charles, became president, and Edison became chairman of the board. Columbia, one of Edison's chief competitors, abandoned the cylinder market in 1912. (Columbia had given up making its own cylinders in 1909, and until 1912 was only releasing cylinders which it had acquired from the Indestructible Phonographic Record Co.) The United States Phonograph Co. ceased production of its U.S. Everlasting cylinders in 1913, leaving the cylinder market to Edison. The disc had steadily grown in popularity with the consumer, thanks especially to the popular roster of Victor artists on disc.

Edison refused to give up the cylinder, introducing instead the Blue Amberol Record, an unbreakable cylinder with what was arguably the best available sound on a recording at the time. The finer sound of the cylinder was partly due to the fact that a cylinder had constant surface speed from beginning to end in contrast to the inner groove distortion that occurred on discs when the surface speed slowed down. Partisans of Edison also argued that the vertical cut in the groove produced a superior sound to the lateral cut of Victor and other disc competitors. Cylinders, though, had truly peaked by this time, and even the superior sound of the Blue Amberols could not persuade the larger public to buy cylinders. Edison conceded to this reality in 1913 when he announced the manufacture of the Edison Disc Phonograph. The Edison Company did not desert its faithful cylinder customers, however, and continued to make Blue Amberol cylinders until the demise of the company in 1929, although most from 1915 on were dubbed from the Diamond Discs. Information for this section was culled from the following sources: Gelatt, Roland. The Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity. Philadelphia: J. B.

Lippincott Company, 1955. Koenigsberg, Allen. Edison Cylinder Records, 1889-1912. New York: Stellar Productions, 1969. Marco, Guy A., ed. Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound in the United States. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993. Millard, Andre. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Read, Oliver, and Walter L. Welch. From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph. Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc., 1959.

Question: Which five words from a nursery rhyme were the first Edison recorded on a phonograph?
Answer: Mary had a little lamb