Musical Inventors #3: Thomas Edison

You all know Thomas Edison, so I won’t go into his entire biography.

But indulge me in this story of visiting his winter home in Fort Myers, Florida,

I went with my wife and her parents. My father-in-law was on crutches at the time but he got around pretty well. He also had a new camcorder and recorded a lot of our visit. At least, he thought he did.

At an early stop, however, he thought he turned it off but somehow didn’t. From that point on, he was turning it off when he thought he was turning it on and vice versa.

While Edison was a big part of inventing and improving motion pictures, which led to my father-in-law’s camcorder, let’s dig into his invention of the phonograph.

Over the course of his life, Edison was granted 1,093 patents:

For inventions like: the light bulb, the magnetic iron ore separator, and the electrographic vote recorder. As well as for improvements to existing technologies, like:

By the late 19th century, he was a well-established and famous inventor. He could have rested on his laurels — and the income they earned him — but his relentless curiosity and desire to innovate led him to experiment with sound recording and reproduction. 

Edison’s idea for the phonograph came, in part, from his work on improving the telegraph and telephone. He was also familiar with the phonautograph, an earlier sound recording device invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857, and he theorized that if sound vibrations could be recorded, they could be played back. 

Still, it demonstrated that sound could be transformed into a physical medium, and Edison built upon that. He thought that if he could record telephone messages, they could be replayed at a later time. This idea led him to experiment with a method for capturing sound waves and converting them into something physical.

In July 1877, Edison began with a device similar to Scott’s phonautograph, but used a strip of paper coated with wax rather than lampblack.

Edison switched to a cylinder, as Scott had done, and replaced the waxed paper with tin foil. Sound waves would cause the diaphragm to vibrate, which in turn moved the stylus which etched a groove into the tin foil. 

The key components of the phonograph were a hand-cranked cylinder, a stylus, and a diaphragm.

When the process was reversed, and the stylus traced the previously etched groove, the vibrations were recreated and amplified by the diaphragm, which reproduced the original sound. The diaphragm was the microphone when recording, and the speaker when listening.

On December 6, 1877, Edison conducted a successful demonstration of his tin foil phonograph. The first recorded and played back message was Edison reciting the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” 

The recording was crude but the playback was recognizable, marking the first time in history that sound had been both captured and reproduced. Later, he said, “I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of.”

His recognition of the phonograph’s profit-making potential led him to quickly file for a patent, on December 24, 1877.

He thought the phonograph would be used for dictation, letter writing, and educational purposes. However, geniuses get bored easily and Edison moved on to other projects. 

That left the phonograph with a few flaws. This allowed competitors, like Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory, to make some advancements, contributing to the overall development of sound recording technology. Bell developed a floating needle that didn’t erode the grooves as quickly. 

In 1887, they approached Edison about collaborating on its development but Edison thought he was the phonograph’s one and only inventor. He refused to partner with them, but that outside interest spurred Edison to revisit the phonograph. 

After all, he loved the phonograph like one of his children. He said, “…I’ve made some machines; but this is my baby, and I expect it to grow up to be a big feller and support me in my old age.”

He started the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company to develop and market his invention.

It didn’t take long for the public to start using the phonograph for listening to music. Edison — and Scott before him — had thought recording sound would mainly be used for dictation in the business world. Edison recognized that music was another possible use and came up with some new ones: elocution lessons, audiobooks for the blind, recording telephone calls and the final words of dying family members, clocks that audibly tell you it’s bedtime, preserving languages threatened with extinction, and more.

And that presented a problem. Recordings were a one-at-a-time medium. In order to sell multiple copies of a song, the musicians would have to perform the song over and over again, once for each copy sold. Every recording was therefore different, if only slightly, but it wasn’t good for the musicians.

Eventually, someone got the idea to record ten copies at the same time by using ten phonographs. That got ten times as many recordings made, but it still wasn’t optimal.

Edison started mass-producing duplicate wax cylinders in 1901.

Edison’s company could produce about 150 cylinders a day. However, the market preferred the flat disc record we know and love today. (More on that in an upcoming installment.) Edison’s cylinders went the way of the Model T, but he didn’t abandon his cylinder customers just yet.

In 1912, he introduced the Blue Amberol Record, a cylinder with the best sound available at the time.

As brilliant as he was, Edison’s taste in music was a little outside the more popular choices of the day. That may be why he didn’t sell as many records as his competitors. Here’s his favorite song, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” as sung by Will Oakland and released on Blue Amberol in 1910.

The phonograph brought music performances from music halls to living rooms. It also preserved the voices and performances of historical figures, so we can now experience their ideas and music long after they’ve passed on to the great concert stage in the sky.

As production increased and prices dropped, the phonograph made music accessible to almost everyone.

The downside is that fewer people played instruments for fun. They just listened to records and the radio instead. The upside of that downside is you can now buy old pianos cheap.

In a 1921 interview with The American Magazine, Edison said:

“Which do I consider my greatest invention? Well, my reply to that would be that I like the phonograph best.”

“Music is so helpful to the human mind that it is naturally a source of satisfaction to me that I have helped in some way to make the very finest music available to millions who could not afford to pay the price and take the time necessary to hear the greatest artists sing and play.”

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