The Wizard of Menlo Park (4 page)

On the day of the concert, Edison responded at last to Johnson’s pleas, and placed a new telephone on the 8:00
A.M
. train bound for Philadelphia. Alas, when Johnson arrived at the Pennsylvania Railroad depot to pick up the package, it could not be found. It turned out to be in the hands of an express company and would not appear until too late that evening. In the end, Johnson had to use the defective equipment that had been used in the rehearsal.

The demo gods gave their blessing to the event, however, and now the
Times
was impressed in every aspect. The volume was excellent, the sound being easily heard by the crowd of 3,500 (Johnson, fond of exaggeration, boasted to Edison that the crowd was even bigger, six thousand people). The songs were deemed “musically enjoyable” and one even was “encored,” though the performers were five miles away.

Johnson knew that “by the turn of a hair” the performance “might have been the most ridiculous farce ever heard of,” yet the narrow aversion of disaster did not slow down his calculations of future profits to be earned charging admission to similar exhibitions. Johnson was as sanguine as any businessperson in the new telephone business about the commercial potential in using telephones to deliver music, but even he could not keep up with the general public. Let the credit for the most farsighted vision of that moment go to one Joseph Hipple, of Spruce Mills, Iowa, who in March 1877 had a fully developed scheme for piping music directly to the home rather than to exhibition halls. Hipple proposed that relay teams of musicians could perform at one central location during the late afternoon and evening hours, providing music on tap, “the same as water and gas.” (Hipple’s idea of music-on-demand was beautiful in conception but advanced no further than Hipple’s exposition in a letter to the editor of the
New York Daily Graphic.
)

At that moment, when Edison’s telephone was better suited for conveying music than the human voice, when the music-loving public was willing to traipse to a concert in which the players were not physically present and was willing to pay for the privilege (at least until the novelty wore off), when it was possible to imagine individual households paying for satellite-radio version 0.1, pre satellites, Edison was in the perfect position to realize the business potential in music. But he did not; telegraphy remained his principal interest. Around the time of the telephone concerts, he redoubled his efforts to complete a complicated contraption of thirty wheels that would convert taps on an alphabetic keyboard into unique vibrations for acoustic telegraphy. He did have a vision of delivering signals directly to households, but it involved sending the human voice, not music. By attaching telephones to gas pipes that were already in place in the home, Edison thought it should be possible to use the gas, instead of electricity, as a medium for conveying sound waves.

The musical telephone offered the opportunity to enjoy live music without being immediately present. The constrictions of geography were loosening, but not those of time: one could listen to performances only synchronously, that is, at the same time the players performed. In retrospect, one can see the need for an invention that permitted the enjoyment of music asynchronously, at a time of the listener’s own choosing. Edison came up with the first gadget that would eventually fill this need. The process that produced the invention could not be called careful planning, but it was something more than pure serendipity. It was the by-product of working on state-of-the-art communications technology, while remaining receptive to chance insight and recombining bits of recently secured experience. Bell invented the telephone while tinkering with acoustic telegraphy; Edison invented the phonograph while tinkering with the telephone.

Initially, telephones were regarded as instruments to be used only by telegraph company employees. Instead of sending messages in Morse code, the operator would transmit the message verbally, but if the message had to be transcribed manually at the receiving end by a human operator, the capacity of the system to carry a given quantity of messages would be dramatically constricted. Some way needed to be devised to record the message mechanically—the practicality of the telephone appeared to hang in the balance.

The very variety of Edison’s previous inventions served him well for tackling the problem of recording. His automatic telegraph used a stylus that rested on a strip of paper that ran continuously beneath it—that paper would be part of Edison’s solution. For another project, making electrical condensers, Edison’s laboratory staff had learned how to apply a wax coating to paper, and Edison had tried to peddle it as a sideline to food producers, with no apparent success (the New York Paper Barrel Company explained that the paper “must be
Sweet
&
Pure
free from oder [
sic
],” a tough requirement for Edison’s grimy laboratory to meet). A legacy of this work in the laboratory was a cupboard well stocked with coated and uncoated paper, cut to various sizes.

A sketch and brief caption in a notebook entry dated 17 July 1877 recorded an idea for putting the paper to use on the telephone problem: Edison and his assistants sketched in bare outline a system that the telegraph company could use to record spoken messages. How exactly the recording would be accomplished was treated as incidental—the paper could be embossed, or perforated with needles, or inked using the electromotograph. The principal point was to enable the company to send the recording for playback and transcription by low-paid copyists, who could work at the rate of twenty-five words a minute, rather than have highly skilled—and highly paid—operators try to record the message in real time at one hundred words a minute as it arrived.

Another project under way was the laboratory’s ongoing work on improving the quality of the telephone transmitter. Under Edison’s direction, the laboratory was in the midst of testing different materials as experimental diaphragms that would vibrate when receiving sound waves. A partial list of candidates: glass, mica, hard rubber, celluloid, aluminum foil, parchment, pith, leather, chamois, cloth, silk, gelatin, ivory, birch bark, rawhide, pig’s bladder, fish guts, and a $5 bill. To each, a mouthpiece was attached and then mounted in a frame for convenient handling. By holding the frame up and speaking in a loud voice while holding a finger on the rear of the diaphragm, one could detect the vibrations, all without the trouble of attaching it to a working telephone and applying electrical current.

No less important than the technical antecedents was the setting, this after-hours laboratory. When Edison was working long hours, which on occasion meant all-night work sessions, his assistants were expected to do the same. Early on, Edison established a tradition of providing a midnight dinner in the lab, brought up by the night watchman. The feast was accompanied by a convivial conversation that was the only time of the workday that Edison would allow himself to relax. An employee described the typical pattern: “Hilarity came with the filling of stomachs, bantering and story telling were interlarded, until Edison arose, stretched, took a hitch at his waistband in sailor fashion and began to saunter away—the signal that dinner was over, and it was time to begin work again.”

The day after Edison had noted the idea for recording voice messages received by a telegraphy office, he came up with a variation. That evening, on 18 July 1877, when the midnight dinner had been consumed but the men had not yet dispersed to return to the work of comparing different types of diaphragms for the telephone, Edison entertained himself speaking into one, while pressing his finger on the rear surface, feeling the vibrations. After a while, he turned around to face Batchelor and casually remarked, “Batch, if we had a point on this we could make a record on some material which we could afterwards pull under the point, and it would give us the speech back.”

As soon as Edison had pointed it out, it seemed so obvious that they did not pause to appreciate what Batchelor would later describe as the “brilliancy” of the suggestion. Everyone jumped up to rig a test. John Kruesi, the laboratory’s chief machinist, took command of soldering a needle to the middle of a diaphragm; he then attached the diaphragm to a stand holding one of the wheels used in the automatic telegraph. Batchelor cut some strips of wax paper, and within an hour, they had the gizmo set up on the table, paper inserted on top of the wheel, and the needle adjusted so that it pressed lightly on the paper. Edison sat down, leaned into the mouthpiece, and while Batchelor pulled the paper through, he delivered the stock phrase the lab used to test telephone diaphragms: “Mary had a little lamb.”

When they took a look, the paper strip, as expected, had irregular marks. Batchelor reinserted the beginning of the strip across the top of the wheel and beneath the needle, then pulled, trying to maintain the same speed as the first time. Out came “ary ad ell am.” “It was not fine talking,” Batchelor recalled, “but the shape of it was there.” The men celebrated with a whoop, shook hands with one another, and worked on. By breakfast the following morning, they had succeeded in getting clear articulation from waxed paper, the first recording medium—in the first midnight recording session.

The all-nighter at the laboratory must have been a routine occurrence, for the discovery was treated surprisingly casually in the lab’s notebooks. The entries for 18 July 1877 were extensive but focused on the telephone; only at the bottom of one page was the following brief entry:

Just tried experiment with a diaphragm [
sic
] having an embossing point & held against parafin [
sic
] paper moving rapidly the spkg vibrations are indented nicely & theres [
sic
] no doubt that I shall be able to store up & reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly

Though Edison used the first-person voice, Batchelor and James Adams, another assistant, signed their names to the page, too.

It was a singular moment in the modern history of invention, but, in the years that would follow, Edison would never tell the story the way it actually unfolded that summer, always moving the events from July 1877 to December. We may guess the reason why: in July, he and his assistants failed to appreciate what they had discovered. At the time, they were working feverishly to develop a set of working telephones to show to their best prospect, William Orton, president of Western Union, and Batchelor’s diary shows entry after entry that July in which he dryly recorded varied phrasings of a single routine: “worked all day and night on Speaker telegraph.” We can assume that Batchelor’s assignments were tightly coupled with Edison’s own experimental agenda of the moment, and the task that occupied the entire staff was to improve the telephone’s ability to handle human speech rather than music. There was no time to pause and reflect on the incidental invention of what was the first working model of the phonograph.

Other potential distractions were shut out, too, such as suggestions from professional acquaintances to strike out in a wholly new direction. On the very day that the laboratory noted its breakthrough in recording sound, George Field, an early investor in Edison’s telegraphy work, wrote him with a suggestion to take notice of the recent demonstration of electric streetlights in Paris. “I feel quite confident,” Field said, “that if you will apply yourself to it that important results might follow.” Edison was unwilling to change course—or even to give the phonograph sustained attention.

The first, brief public mention of the crude phonograph came in mid-August 1877, a month after the midnight birth (even then it still lacked a name). Edward Johnson told the
Philadelphia Record
that Edison had invented an instrument “by which a speech can be recorded while it is being delivered on prepared paper” and the same paper could “redeliver” it at any time. Edison and Batchelor, focused as they were at the time on improving the telephone for speech, naturally thought that their device would be used for speech, ignoring music. But curiously, even Johnson, the impresario in charge of exhibiting Edison’s musical telephone, failed to consider the possibilities for recording music, too.

It took a long while for Edison to decide what to call the contraption. By this time, “phonograph” had been jotted onto a laboratory notebook, but the word was in common usage at the time as a synonym for “shorthand.” The invention continued to be labeled in the notebooks with the broader rubric “speaking telegraph,” reflecting the assumption that it would be put to use in the telegraph office, recording messages. An unidentified staff member drew up a list of possible names for the machine, which included:

Tel-autograph

Tel-autophone

Polyphone = manifold sounder

Autophone = Self-sounder

Cosmophone = Universal sounder

Acoustophone = Audible speaker

Otophone = Ear-sounder = speaker

Antiphone = Back-talker

Liquphone = Clear speaker

Chronophone = Time-announcer = Speaking clock

Didaskophone = Teaching speaker = Portable teacher

Glottophone = Language sounder or speaker

Climatophone = Weather announcer

Klangophone = Bird-cry sounder

Hulagmophone = Barking sounder

Omphlegraph = voice writer

Epograph = speech writer

aerophone = air sound

phonomime

Ecophone

As he and his staff made progress on the telephone’s speech capabilities, Edison kept Western Union’s Orton briefed on the good news. The sensitivity of Edison’s carbon microphone permitted the speaker to stand ten feet away from the speaking tube, he wrote excitedly, after another long night of experimenting. In September, Edison’s telephones were placed in competition against Bell’s in Orton’s presence, and Edison won an immediate order for 150 sets. Edison wrote a colleague of Orton’s surprise: “He had no idea that he could get it so loud.”

The expense of maintaining the laboratory was considerable, the money Edison had received in 1875 was spent, and the initial order for telephones from Western Union did not immediately ease the cash shortage. In October 1877, he wrote his father that he was “at present very hard up for cash,” but if his “speaking telegraph” was successful, he would receive an advance on royalties. The commercial potential of his still-unnamed recording apparatus remained out of sight. Edison seems to have been disappointed when he told Benjamin Butler, an attorney who had represented him in the past, that he had not yet achieved the goal he had mentioned to Butler: developing the ability to “print” the human voice on paper using a particular mark for a given sound, without prior recording, as one typesets a romanized alphabet.