Introduction: The Original Commercial Application for Sound Recording
Thomas Edison was working on improvements to the telephone in 1877, looking for a way to record its output. He believed that the telephone would never be successful in business unless it would make a permanent record. He experimented with a wax-coated paper tape, inscribed by the vibrations of a telephone “receiver” (that is, the part that reproduces sounds. Although he was not successful in getting the device to work very well, he focused on recording sound directly, rather than through the telephone. This work led to the invention of the phonograph in 1877. In July of that year, he nonetheless was among the first to attempt making telephone recordings. (See Rosenberg et al., Papers of Thomas Edison V. 3, p.441) However, office dictation machines and entertainment phonographs were to become the first commercial applications of the new invention. After demonstrating his purely acoustic phonograph late that year, he moved on to other projects, most notably his system of electric lighting. By 1881, Alexander Graham Bell funded work in Washington, DC undertaken by his Irish cousin Chichester Bell, along with the talented machinist Charles Sumner Tainter. The team took up work on Edison’s phonograph and developed an improved version that they named the graphophone, offering it for sale in 1887. Instead of tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder, the graphophone used a cylinder made of wax, which resulted in more intelligible recordings.
In response, Edison in 1888 hastily invented an “improved phonograph,” which incorporated many features that were similar to the graphophone. The two machines, phonograph and graphophone, were offered for sale in the late 1880s as mechanical replacements for the stenographer. Stenography had been used for decades in business and government, and by professional writers, lawyers, ministers, and others who needed a record of their speech. It was expensive to employ a stenographer, but justified where accuracy was important, such as in transcripts of congressional or parliamentary debates. Shorthand, a method of high-speed writing, was already well-established for this purpose by the middle of the 19th century. It allowed stenographers to write quickly enough to keep up with a conversation. In fact, the word “phonography” had been in use as a synonym for shorthand writing at least since the 1840s.
