by Leonard Marcus
ON MAY 16, 1758, one hundred twenty years before a piece of tinfoil told Thomas Edison that Mary had a little lamb, John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, preached a sermon in Lurgan, Ireland. In the village he saw a "statue ... the like of which all allowed was not to be seen in Europe." Wesley described the contraption, created by a local artisan named Miller, as a "figure of an old man, standing in a case, with a curtain drawn before him, over against a clock which stood on the other side of the room. Every time the clock struck he opened the door with one hand, drew back the curtain with the other, turned his head, as if looking round on the company and then said, with a clear, loud, articulate voice, 'Past one, two, three,' and so on." Four years later, the Lurganers still being in need of salvation, Wesley returned, this time making a point of meeting Miller. On April 26, 1762, Wesley noted in his journal that so many people had come to see the android, "Mr. Miller was in danger of being ruined, not having time to attend to his own business." Since nobody would buy the prototype, nor commission him to design other revolutionary audio breakthroughs, Miller had disassembled it. Ten years passed and, when on June 14, 1773, Wesley again preached in Lurgan, Miller told the clergyman that he had reconstructed the device, improving the design. Now there were two androids, "which would not only speak but sing hymns alternately with an articulate voice; that he had made a trial and it answered well." The artisan was now not only enticing Wesley with an over-engineered alarm clock, but tempting him with a fellow evangelist as well-and an embryonic Methodist at that. But Miller didn't know when he could perfect his masterpiece, "since he could work on it only during his leisure hours." And that is all we know about Mr. Miller and his curious invention. While we do not know how this Frankensteinian timepiece worked, it can probably be described as a machine in which sound to be reproduced is programmed, or recorded, into the mechanism by the designer, and the resulting sound is that of the apparatus.
Opposed to this mechanical method is the acoustical, including the electrical, in which sonic vibrations themselves are captured in performance and then reproduced. In this process, the resulting sound is (at least expected to be) that of the independent performance. For most of the history of sound reproduction, the mechanical method held sway. Yet, since sound evaporates as soon as it is produced, men, ever seeking permanence in life's ephemera, long sought ways to record, pre serve, and reproduce it--or at least to believe that such possibilities existed.
Myths, Stories, and Natural Phenomena According to Kwang Tung, a scholarly governor of mid -nineteenth-century Peking, an ancient Chinese tome depicts a sound recorder that played a part in Chinese history. The story was recounted by Sir Robert Hart, the Irish-Chinese inspector general of the Maritime Customs Bureau in China, to whom Kwang narrated it. The two -thousand - year -old book supposedly tells of a prince who, a thousand years earlier, had to communicate secretly with another who lived in a faraway district.
The prince would talk into a special box, which he then would close and dispatch by trusted courier to his friend. The second prince, upon opening the box, would hear the words that had been spoken into it. Why a box that would blab as soon as any interceptor took off its cover was given a higher security rating than the trusty runner himself was apparently not made clear. Nor was such an explanation necessary in order to cement Sir Robert's belief in the story. It satisfied a deep-seated urge for some sort of immortality, which the capture and permanent preservation of one's own voice implies.
A Captain Vasterlock, returning from a trip to the South Seas in 1632, also inspired a coterie of believers with his tales of a sponge, harvested by native islanders, that retained sound within its cells. If a native spoke into the sponge, he could hear it reproduce his voice simply by squeezing it.
Subsequent squeezes on the "sound -dry" sponge would presumably produce only silence.
About twenty years later, Cyrano de Bergerac, the generous -nosed swordsman/poet/author on whom Rostand would one day base his popular play, echoed the sponge image in The States and Empires of the Moon-a book we would today consider a science -fiction novel. Here is a lunar philosopher, who apparently doesn't know that his environment is airless, explaining the nature of sound to the hero:
For the sake of brevity let us simply consider the case of the notes of a lute touched by the hands of a virtuoso. You will ask me how I can possibly perceive something so far away from me and which I cannot see at all. Does a sponge come out of my ears and soak up this music in order to bring it to me? Or does the musician beget another little musician inside my head with a little lute and instructions to sing the same tunes to me like an echo? No; the miracle is due to the fact that the plucked string strikes the air which is composed of little bodies and drives it into my brain, gently piercing it with these little bodily nothings. If the string is taut the note is high, because it drives the atoms more vigorously and once the organ is thus penetrated it furnishes my imagination with sufficient of them from which to make its picture.
The audio seminar over, Cyrano in 1650 next fore tells, remarkably, not only an acoustic phono graph, but headphones as well. The philosopher has left the hero with a pair of books, each boxed in a cover carved out of a huge jewel:
On opening a box, I discovered in it a metal object, not unlike one of our clocks, which was filled with all manner of tiny springs and mysterious machines. It was a book indeed, but a miraculous book, with neither pages nor letters: it was, in short, a book where the eyes were useless for reading and for which only the ears were needed. When someone desires to "read," he winds up this machine with a great quantity of little threads of all kinds, then he turns the needle to the chapter he wishes to hear and at once there issue from it, as from the mouth of a man or from a musical instrument, all the distinct and different sounds which the great lunarians employ for the expression of their language.
When I have later reflected upon this miraculous invention for making books, I am no longer astonished to see how the young men in that country possessed more under standing at sixteen or eighteen than the gray beards do in ours, since, knowing how to read as soon as they can talk, they are never without reading matter. In their room, on a walk, in town, or on a journey they can carry some thirty of these books in their pockets or slung from their belts. They have only to wind up a spring in order to hear a single chapter, or several, indeed, if they are in a mood to listen to a whole book. Thus you can have all the great men, both dead and alive, perpetually about you, to address you viva voce.
This gift occupied me more than an hour.
Finally, having attached them to myself in the form of ear pendants, I went out for a walk.
Song and speech from the inanimate probably entered mythology as soon as the first man heard the wind howl around a rock and imagined a god's voice choosing him to subjugate his people. One of the best -documented ancient inanimate objects to which lifelike sounds were attributed may in fact soon begin to "sing" again.
The Greeks knew of two giant black basalt statues, fifty-nine feet high, that overlooked the western plains of Thebes. They assumed that the dark colossi were of Memnon, the Homeric black demigod who was the king of Ethiopia and son of Eos, goddess of the dawn. In 27 B.C., after the Roman conquest, the head of the northernmost colossus was toppled by an earthquake. One can only imagine everybody's surprise, when from then on, Memnon would "sing" greetings to the dawn, his mother, each morning.
We get many reliable descriptions of the phenomenon from Roman sources. Strabo testifies he heard the statue while he was in company with Aelius Gallus and other friends; Juvenal and Tacitus refer to the "vocal Memnon"; and Pausanias compared the sound to a harp arpeggio. The tones probably originated from the changes of tempera ture in the stone as the sun rose each morning. This classical tourist attraction lost its vocal talent, as anyone who has ever hired an inexperienced con tractor can easily understand, when a second -century Roman emperor ordered it repaired.' The Greeks and Romans notwithstanding, the colossi were not of Memnon at all, "Memnon" possibly being a corruption of "Amenophis." About 1,400 years before the Christian era, Amenophis III-pharaoh of the XVIII dynasty, founder of Luxor, builder of Karnak and Thebes, and father of the famous monotheist pharaoh Akhenaton had a funerary temple constructed across the Nile from Luxor. The temple was fronted by the two colossi, supposed to represent him, certainly not some Ethiopian.
[ For all numbered footnotes, see "Notes to Future Scholars" at end of article.]
Today, 125 miles down the Nile, stands the As wan High Dam, whose presence has recently been causing seepage problems in the Luxor area. The underground water is so endangering the colossi that the Egyptian government has begun making plans to protect them by building concrete foundations-and at the same time to restore them. Ac cording to a New York Times report last August, Egyptians are speculating that the restoration may result in Memnon resuming his performance after an 1800-year intermission.
Mechanical Contrivances Records of man-made mechanical sound reproducers antedate even Memnon's musical propensities. Reports from China of the third century B.C. mention a mechanical orchestra constructed for the Han emperor. We don't know how the orchestra sounded, nor how it worked, but by the seventh century A.D. such automata had become common enough among the Chinese nobility for a book to have been written about them. The book's title, Shui shih t'u Ching (Book of Hydraulic Elegancies), at least suggests that water pressure was the activating agent. During the next three centuries one finds references to gadgets that represent everything from girls singing and monks begging to birds flying and otters catching fish.
In Greece during the first century, Hero of Alexandria described musical and other automatic de vices activated by water, weights, and steam. But references to automata go back as far as the fourth century B.C. to a friend of Plato's, Archytas of Tarentum, who amused himself by creating a wooden pigeon, suspended from a pivoted bar, that revolved through its excitement by com pressed air or steam. I do not know of any evidence that the pigeon cooed or made any sound or indeed made anything else that pigeons generally make-but it should be noted that Archytas, a follower of Pythagoras, was one of the early investigators of acoustical phenomena.
The ninth -century Byzantine emperor Theophilus, who spent his entire reign fighting the caliphs of Baghdad, took time off in about 835 to impress foreign visitors by commissioning an elaborate golden throne. When activated, mechanical lions supporting the royal seat roared and mechanical birds in mock trees on either side sang.
Six years or so later the unimpressed caliphs killed him anyway.
Two often -told stories involve the creation of androids by a pair of the thirteenth century's most noted philosophers, Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon. Albertus, the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, is credited with the invention of either a bronze head or an iron man-depending on the authority-who spoke. One report claims that the great Albert worked on his invention for forty years, only to have it smashed by his more saintly protégé, who wanted to demonstrate "the futility of man's labor." If this story is true, it should be pointed out that even by the time Albert reached his forties Thomas was no longer his pupil.
Their contemporary, the English friar Roger Bacon, one of the original proponents of the scientific method, praised Albertus Magnus as "the most noted of Christian scholars," although he was philosophically antagonistic to him. Bacon also is credited with inventing a talking head. What be came of the alleged head is unknown, but while Albert was using his scholarship to revive the reputation of Aristotle, Bacon was spending fourteen years in prison for his heresies.' The fourteenth century saw the development of mechanical clocks and their spread throughout Europe. It was only natural for the clockwork to drive figures and sound -producers of various sorts; a pinned barrel-which was to dominate the field for centuries-became the common activating device. The clockwork would turn the barrel, and the pins would push or strike an automaton into life. Any respectable city would be ashamed not to have bell -strikers, or jaquemarts, adorning its main clock, and some even boasted automatic carillons, the earliest of which date from this era.
The coiled tempered -steel spring was to the sixteenth century what the transistor is to ours. It allowed for both miniaturization and portability and, combined with the contemporaneous re discovery and translation of the writings of Hero of Alexandria, it brought the state of the art of mechanical sound reproducers to a new high. In the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna one can see a mechanical lady, dating from about 1540, who plays the mandolin. The Musee de Cluny in Paris boasts a "Ship of Charles V," nearly a yard long, from the same era. As the hour strikes, a miniature organ plays, as does a band of musicians on deck; the boat rocks, sailors move in the rigging, and ten courtiers "pay their respects to Charles, who bows in acknowledgement." It was also the century of automatic organs, virginals, and harpsichords. One of these virginals made by Bidermann of Augsburg around 1600 was reported in Wroclaw, Poland (then Breslau) at least up until World War II. With forty-four keys and jacks, it could be played manually; automatically, it had a repertoire of six tunes, using seventeen of the jacks. You could thus improvise duets with this predecessor of Music Minus One.
Cyrano de Bergerac (above) described a needle-activated phono graph with headphones. Albert the Great reportedly built a talking head.
----
This mid -sixteenth-century lady, possibly of Spanish origin, actually
plays her mandolin, thanks to her mechanical innards.
Vienna Kunsthistoriscnes Museum Henry VIII of England is known to have had an automatic virginal "that goethe with a whele with oute playinge uppon." In 1599 his daughter Elizabeth I sent the Turkish grand sultan a two-story high musical clock, constructed by organ-builder Thomas Dallam (who went along, presumably to supply installation and warranty service). Every song on sixteen bells, follow it with a tantara by two mechanical trumpeters standing on the second floor, segue into a five -part organ tune, which was repeated, and finish-from a holly bush atop the sixteen -foot -high organ-with "birds and thrushes, which at the end of the musick did singe and shake theire winges." How do you like that, Robert Moog? Elizabeth's eventual successor Queen Victoria had to make do with a musical bustle she received in 1887; if she had it on, it would play "God Save the Queen" whenever she sat down. Victoria's reputation being what it was, it is doubtful she ever wore it.
The refinement of clockwork techniques, combined with the barrel-and-pin mechanism and now a bellows, brought mechanical sound-reproducing devices to a zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A French gentleman named Jacques de Vaucanson spent his life, encompassing most of the eighteenth century, constructing robots of various sorts-both utilitarian and aesthetic. In 1738, at the age of twenty-nine, he constructed his first major opus: a life-size flute player, worked by a bellows, which could play half a dozen tunes. About ten years later he amazed Paris with the first working automobile, propelled by a clockwork engine. Around 1750, with the miniaturization of Vaucanson's technique, singing mechanical birds became popular.
The sound came from a small pipe activated by a bellows, with a sliding stopper to alter the pitch. A cam controlled both the admission of air and the duration of the tone, and a lever on the bellows added realistic pauses. Small music boxes proliferated throughout the world, many incorporated into clocks, watches, and snuff boxes. They would include bells and miniature drums and-after its invention in 1776 by Aristide Janvier--the ubiquitous metal comb. A single cylinder might offer eight or ten programs.
Composers became fascinated with the mechanisms and wrote pieces for them. Haydn in 1792 93 composed for the flute -clocks (Flotenuhr or Laufwerk) that Prince Esterhazy's librarian, Father Primitivus Niemecz, constructed for their master (these "clocks" did not tell time); the com poser even supervised the pinning on the barrels.
Around 1782 Mozart wrote an Adagio and Allegro in F minor (K. 594) and in 1791 a Fantasia in F mi nor (K. 608) and an Andante in F (K. 616) for mechanical organ. Played by human beings, the Mozart pieces can all be heard on Columbia MS 6856 (E. Power Biggs), Lyrichord 7168 (the Soni Vento rum Wind Quartet), and Telefunken 6.41117 (organ and strings, including Herbert Tachezi and two Harnoncourts). Count Deym, who commissioned Mozart, also commissioned Beethoven to write some pieces for the flute -clock and harp-clock. An Adagio and Allegro have along with two of the Mozart works (K. 608 and K. 616) and seven of Haydn's thirty-two clock-work tunes, by a wind quintet on a charming MPS disc, "Stucke fur eine Flotenuhr" (25 20902-4), distributed by BASF in Europe but unavailable here.
Best known and most widely recorded of all the compositions for machines is, of course, the Wellington's Victory (or Battle Symphony) that Beethoven concocted in 1813 for the pan-harmonicon, a full mechanical orchestra invented by Johann Nepomuk Maize', inventor also of the metronome. The original pan-harmonicon, first exhibited in Vienna in 1804, was the result of Malzel's adding violins, cellos, and clarinets to a previous automatic instrument of his, containing flutes, trumpets, drums, cymbals, triangles, and hammer-struck strings, all activated by pinned barrels driven by weights. Before he snared Beethoven to write for an even more elaborate version of the pan-harmonicon, he had programmed it to play music by Haydn, Mozart, and others. In fact, anticipating today's "innovative" concerts that attract customers by adding rock groups to symphonic performances, the December 8, 1813, concert in which Beethoven's Seventh Symphony had its premiere enlarged its appeal by featuring the pan harmonicon, which dutifully ground out marches by Dussek and Pleyel.
An even more ingenious mechanical orchestra was the componium, constructed by an inventor named Koppen and exhibited in Paris about 1829.
------- The detail of a late nineteenth-century hand -cranked
cylinder music box, above, shows not only the ubiquitous metal comb,
but accompanying bells and drum. The "M. F." on the lyre stands
for the Swiss manufacturer, Mermod Freres. A perforated paper roll plays,
and electricity powers, the Violano-Virtuoso, right. Holes on the roll's
left activate the piano, those on the right the violin, whose metal "fingers" project
upward from the fingerboard. This model, made in 1914, could crank out
the Beethoven Violin Concerto.
This gizmo not only performed, but composed! Its modus operandi might have been an automatic means of playing the composition -by -dice game that seems to have attracted even Mozart, who apparently composed the hundred -odd measures necessary to play one version of it. A toss of the dice determines each measure, and all measures are categorized by harmony so that the entire com position fits together nicely. One contemporary account states that the composing machine "improvised charming variations without ever repeating itself." In "Mozart's game" sixteen tosses of the dice, for the sixteen -measure minuet, give quadrillions of possible combinations.
The componium's Parisian success led its promoters to exhibit it in London the following year.
But the exhibition there coincided with the death of King George IV, and the apparatus received little attention. On its way back to Paris it was held up in customs, wouldn't you know, where it was severely damaged by dampness.
Lest one think that by the nineteenth century the human race had given up its quest for talking machines in its preoccupation with musical ones, note the masterpiece of Josef Faber. In 1869 he fascinated all Vienna with his talking man. It had ivory reeds for vocal cords, had a rubber tongue and lips, and worked via a keyboard, which also altered the mouth cavity as it formed the words.
Herr Faber must have had an uncanny ear for linguistics: He provided his android with an optional French accent by a nose tube for nasal quality and a small fan wheel for rolled r's. Reportedly you could hardly understand a word.
Before the century was over, perforated paper and metal discs began to replace the pinned cylinder, or barrel, as the mechanism in sound -reproducing devices. Until metal discs became avail able, it was possible to increase the number of tunes in a music box only through machines with interchangeable cylinders, and these were expensive. Then during the 1880s the polyphon appeared on the market. In this type of device, the pins were embedded in more easily changeable steel discs, or the discs were slotted. The most elaborate model was the Regina, which used seven-inch discs, each of which controlled two minutes of music from two metal combs that spanned seven octaves. Even more intriguing, from a later point of view, the Regina included a record -changing mechanism that could hold a dozen of these discs.
The polyphon actually came after the invention of the phonograph, and, when the disc phono graph began to monopolize the field, the company hedged its bet with the Reginaphone, which played both steel and phonograph discs. In today's era of omnidirectional speakers, one feature of the Reginaphone rings a bell-or plucks a comb; it boasted a speaker that projected the sound "up ward from the interior of the case instead of being sent out through the front. Thus the sound is most evenly distributed and harshness of tone avoided." The heyday of perforated paper tape as a music-making medium also postdated the invention of the phonograph, but I could not leave the discussion of mechanical contrivances without including the most important of all, the player piano.
Perforated paper tape as a means of control had evolved in the textile industry. As far back as 1725, Basile Bouchon created a punched-tape system to direct the needles controlling the warp -holding cords in looms, thus determining the pattern of the fabric as well. Twenty years later Vaucanson--he of the six -foot -tall flute player-improved the mechanism by replacing the tape with the more easily substitutable perforated cards. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Joseph Marie Jacquard had so improved the control mechanism that the "Jacquard loom" became a major impetus to the Industrial Revolution, inspiring as many workers' riots against it as any other nineteenth-century mechanism.
In 1863 a Parisian named Fourneaux incorporated a roll of perforated paper in his pianista, a windup machine whose "fingers" could play a piano if you pushed it close enough. As you wound the crank a bellows would blow air through the holes in the paper, thus causing the proper "fingers" to depress keys as the roll rolled. The public was offered other pneumatic artists, but it wasn't buying-until American engineer Edwin S. Votey filed a patent in 1897 for a mechanical piano that, like the harmonium, worked via foot pedals. He assigned the patent, upon its grant in 1900, to the promotion-minded Aeolian Company, which in turn assigned to it the name "pianola." A similar device, the eighty-"fingered," two-"footed" Vorzetzer (or sitter-in-front), appeared in Europe in 1904 as the brainchild of another Edwin, the scion of the Welte family that for generations had been the proprietors of a flourishing Black Forest music-box firm. In 1885, in fact, the Weltes had al ready used a roll of perforated paper to control a music box.
As these mechanical performers grew in popularity, piano manufacturers began to incorporate the mechanisms into the instruments themselves, thus transforming the pneumatic piano players into player pianos. Edwin Welte took the concept one step further with his delicately named Welte Mignon. As Arthur Loesser put it in Men, Women, and Pianos:
A pneumatic playing machine that worked automatically and electrically-and was capable of rapid changes in the force of the air puffs it gave forth-might seem competent to reproduce the exact playing of a professional performing artist. The artists, playing on a specially built instrument, could complete an electrical circuit by means of contacts situated just beneath each key. In this way, a set of lead pencils could be activated to make longer or shorter marks on an actual player-piano paper roll as it revolved at the standard speed. The length and spacing of the pencil marks, then, would exactly correspond to the performer's own strokes upon the keys, thus giving the precise nuance of his rhythm and phrasing. His pedaling could be similarly recorded. His shadings would be more difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce, because the force of the key stroke--since it merely made a connection--could not affect the action of the recording pencils. The nearest solution was to have the artist's shading care fully noted in a copy of the music by another musician and then synthesized on the finished roll by the cutting of special perforations near both its edges, designed to control the force of the air puffs. Some of this synthesis of shading could be achieved with a high degree of plausibility and, when coupled with the authentic recording of the key strokes, often gave a close approximation to the artist's playing. Incidentally, this type of machine had a special advantage:
Any false note played by the artists could be rectified with complete smoothness by the simple process of erasing the pencil mark that represented it on the master roll and substituting an equivalent, correct one.
Vladimir Horowitz, who has made dynamic nuances the core of his art, once told me that the piano rolls he recorded upon didn't sound any thing like the way he played. Considering the dynamic limitations of the rolls, and their inability to pedal subtly (the pedal would be either fully up or fully down), one can appreciate his dissatisfaction. But within a year of the introduction of the Welte-Mignon, Edwin Welte was able to begin persuading the world's leading pianists and com posers to record for him--other companies like Aeolian, Pleyel, Duo-Art, and Ampico soon followed suit--and most of the performers seemed quite enthusiastic about the process. There was, after all, money to be made with it.
Eventually, practically every important pianist committed his art to punched paper: Busoni, Nikisch, Samaroff, Backhaus, Hofmann, Rubin stein, Landowska. Godowsky, Lhevinne, De Pachmann, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Leschetizky, Carrell, Schnabel, Serkin, and, of course, Horowitz among them. More than two dozen LPs of Ampico and Duo-Art piano rolls made by such luminaries are available on Everest Records' "Archive of Piano Music," an equal number are avail able on Klavier Records, and three well-reviewed LPs of Ampico rolls, titled "The Golden Age of Piano Virtuosi," can be had on Argo DA 41 (Lhevinne). DA 42 (Rosenthal and Rachmaninoff), and DA 43 (Godowsky and others).
In 1912 Artur Nikisch conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Grieg's Piano Concerto starring a pianola as the soloist; within a decade the fad was followed by such conductors as Josef Stransky with the New York Philharmonic and Leopold Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Not only did such composers as Grieg, Debussy, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Saint -Satins, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Falla, and Faure record on piano rolls (Gershwin's roll of the Rhapsody in Blue with new orchestral accompaniment conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, on Columbia, was reviewed last month), but several wrote music especially for the medium. Like Haydn and Mozart, they were fascinated by the new mechanism. Taking advantage of the ma chine's ability to play what human pianists could not, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Toch, and Antheil composed pieces that at times included chords with more than thirty notes, simultaneous notes spaced farther apart than hands could encompass, and rhythms that cannot be written in traditional notation but can easily be punched into paper.
Hindemith's 1926 Toccata was written for mechanical piano, Antheil's notorious Ballet mecanique included a player piano among its instruments, and, as David Hamilton has noted in these pages, a 1918-19 version of Stravinsky's Les Noces exists, up to the end of the second tableau, that is scored for two cimbalons, harmonium, pianola, and percussion. In the score, the pianola part re quires as many as five staves to indicate all the notes since, to quote the composer, it "was not in tended for human hands but for direct translation into the punch-card language of the automated poltergeist." A year earlier Stravinsky had com posed a Study for Pianola that eventually became Madrid, the last of the Four Studies for Orchestra.
In its original form it was finally heard in 1921 on a roll recorded by the composer. Stravinsky also transcribed for and recorded on piano rolls most of his major early works, including the Rite of Spring, Petrushka, The Firebird, and even such vocal works as Les Noces. (Presumably you could sing along with it.) Of these, only the Firebird piano roll is currently available, on Klavier Records KS 126.
There is no doubt that in its time the player piano reproduced performances with acoustically higher fidelity than the phonograph could-or per haps can today. The piano roll itself was even more easily editable than magnetic tape. Yet it left so much to be desired musically and was so restricted generically--nobody figured out a way to record Caruso on piano rolls--that by the end of the 1920s the scratchy phonograph was able to consign it to oblivion.
Acoustical Methods The procedure for inscribing sonic vibrations onto paper was known for at least three-quarters of a century before Edison translated the resultant wiggles back into sound. Toward the end of the eighteenth century Dr. Thomas Young, an acrobatic British surgeon [see more detailed treatment below] still in his early twenties, noted, "I fancy I have made some singular observations on vibrating strings, and I mean to pursue my experiments." In 1799, Young at age twenty-six prepared for the Royal Society a paper on sound and light in which he described his investigations into some "very obscure but interesting subjects. As far as I know, most of these observations are new." The paper contains measurements of the quantity of air discharged through an aperture; of the pressure needed to make organ pipes "speak"; of the frequencies of vibrations corresponding to audible tones. Young devotes considerable space to describing the vibration of cords, "which may vibrate as a whole or in 2, 3, 4, etc., parts. The mix ture of these 'partial tones' gives the quality to the note." After describing the work of Bernoulli, who anticipated him in some investigations of sound in 1753 and 1762, as well as of Euler and Lagrange, Young concludes with, "There are still several particulars' respecting the gyrations of chords, and formation of synchronous harmonics, the combi nation of sounds in the air, the phenomena of beats, on which I flatter myself that I shall be able to throw some new light." While a professor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Young in 1802 published a syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy that he would give in the theater of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. According to contemporary accounts, his lectures were so dull that even his fellow professors in attendance had difficulty staying awake, much less paying attention.
-- Edison National Historic Site; - Leon Scott de Martinville's phon
autograph, left, antedated Edison's phonograph by a generation. It
could record but not reproduce sound. -- At right, Edison's own
telegraph repeater. A recorder embossed a paper disc with the Morse
code so that a reproducer (shown here) could later transmit the message.
It was Edison's work on the telegraph repeater that led to his original
phonograph, shown at center.
Fortunately, he resigned his professorship to prepare his lectures for publication in 1806, and these papers became widely circulated throughout Europe. In Lecture XXXI, titled "On the Propagation of Sound," Young described a prophetic experiment:
If we fix a small pencil in a vibrating rod, and draw a sheet of paper along, against the point of the pencil, an undulating line will be marked on the paper, and will correctly rep resent the progress of the vibration. What ever the nature of the sound transmitted through any medium may be, it may be shown that the path thus described will also indicate the situation of the different particles at any one time' Even more farsightedly, perhaps, he described his investigations into the type of recording horn best suited for focusing distant sound at the stylus. After dismissing the conical shape, he states that "a parabola is the proper form of the section of a tube calculated for collecting a sound which proceeds from a great distance into a single point. ... The parabola ought to be much elongated, and to consist of a portion of the conoid remote from the vertex." This sort of sound -collector is used today for radar antennas and radio telescopes, and for making nature recordings.
Two years after Young's death in 1829 an anonymous memoir of his life stated that these widely disseminated lectures were "a mine to which every one has since resorted, and contained the original hints of more things since claimed as discoveries, than can perhaps be found in a single production of any known author." Among the miners, apparently, was Leon Scott de Martinville, a Frenchman of Scottish descent. Scott took Young's concept of a vibrating rod, substituted a diaphragm for it, added a horn, and used a hog bristle instead of Young's pencil. The bristle was attached by sealing wax to a parchment diaphragm activated by sound that the horn had focused. Pressed against a manually rotatable lamp-blacked cylinder, it would transcribe the sonic vibrations. The result was the "phonautograph," a device that could record the human voice, music, or indeed any sound.
The phonautograph attracted considerable attention, and in 1859, after it was exhibited in Lon don, Prince Albert took it home and found he could amuse Queen Victoria with it. Now all that remained was for someone to figure out how to re produce that recorded sound.
Among those working on the problem, two were unknowingly racing toward the same 1877 dead line: Edison and Charles Cros. Around 1869, Cros, a minor French poet, discovered the basic prin ciples of three -color photography, only to be over shadowed when Ducos du Hauron, who got all the credit, made the same discovery simultaneously and wrote about it in greater detail. Poor Cros was about to have the same thing happen to him again.
(Poor Thomas Young actually got there first with the three-color principle.) On April 18, 1877, Cros wrote a paper describing a method of making metal discs from the tracing of "a needle over a surface blackened by fire" through "a well-known photographic process." In other words, still trying to make some use of his photographic expertise, he proposed photoengraving the phonautographs. On April 30 he de posited the paper-sealed-with the Academie des Sciences. In New Jersey, on July 18, Thomas Edi son noted in his lab workbook: "Just tried experi ment with diaphram having an embossing point & held against parafinn paper moving rapidly. The spkg vibrations are indented nicely & theres no doubt that I shall be able to store up & reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly." On August 12, on a page labeled "Phonograph," Edison's lab book shows not only a roll of paper tape as the recording/reproducing medium, but, on the bottom of the page, a sketch illustrating that the tape can be recorded by a mag net! (On December 3, having continued to work this vein, Edison wrote: "Recording by magnet works OK but not so strong as with voice, requires our loudest telephone to do the biz.") A notation of September 7 by an Edison assist ant, James Adams, states that "it would seem that so wonderful [a] result as this would require elaborate machinery. On the contrary the apparatus although crude is wonderfully simple." It appears that something must have been heard from the paper tape by that date.
In the October issue of La Semaine du Clerge, the Abbe Lenoir discussed Cros's invention, coincidentally calling it the "phonograph."' On November 29,5 Edison sketched what would be the phonograph itself. A sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder had replaced the pa per tape.
[For a more detailed description, see the following article, "The Parallel Careers of Edison and Bell"-Ed.]
He handed the sketch to John Kruesi, who took it back to the machine shop and on December 6 completed the first working model.
Edison wrapped some tinfoil around the ma chine's cylinder, glued it into place, turned the crank, and dictated into the mouthpiece. Exactly how he rendered the nursery rhyme has been told in conflicting versions. I like the one repeated years later by one of his associates. According to this story, Edison said:
Hallo! Hallo! Hallo! Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow, And everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
One wonders whom he was laughing at.
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Notes to Future Scholars
1--Repair of Memnon. Every source, from the Encyclopedia Britannica (all editions at least in this century, including the "totally revised" latest) to the New York Times, "credits" the ordering of Memnon's repair to the Emperor Septimius Severus, the year being either 170 or 174. Nobody seems to have noticed that the Roman emperor for either of those years was Marcus Aurelius.
Severus would not become emperor for nearly a quarter of a century and, by 170, had not yet even become a senator.
2--Mechanical speech. Some authorities refer to an inventor named Kratzenstein (and why did these old scholars follow the Communist practice of omitting first names?) who produced a device in 1779 that would imitate human vowel sounds. The apparatus is generally written off with a phrase like, "It does not seem to have been a great success." But that same year Professor Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein of Copenhagen in vented the harmonium. Still to be found in homes and small churches, it proved a greater success than any mechanical talking gadget ever invented.
3--Young's lectures. References to these published lectures imply that the recording device is demonstrated.
The publication was actually issued in two parts, one of text, the other of beautifully multicolored illustrations.
Although various sound waves are shown, possibly derived from a recorder, no device is actually illustrated.
4--The word "phonograph." All references to the coiner of the word give that distinction to a J. B. Fenby, at times designated as a resident of Worcester, Massachusetts, who in 1863 patented an "Electro Magnetic Phono graph." No evidence exists that anybody named J. B. Fenby lived in Massachusetts at that time. The U.S. Patent Office did not issue a patent to anybody named Fenby in 1863. Or 1862. Or 1864. No patent was given for an electro magnetic phonograph anywhere in the world in 1863. Otherwise, the story is true.
On January 13, 1863, the British Patent Office issued patent No. 101 to Joseph Beverley Fenby of Worcester, England, for "a new or improved instrument or apparatus to be attached to pianofortes, organs, and other similar keyed musical instruments for printing the score of any music performed on the said instruments." No where in the text or in the large accompanying illustrations could I find the word "phonograph," although it would certainly have been an appropriate name for the contraption. Maybe Fenby referred to it as such to his friends.
5--The date of the invention. Scholars already know this, but since references until the past few years have it wrong, it may be pertinent to clear it up here. For years, the official date of the phonograph's invention was given as August 12, 1877, and Edison held subsequent anniversaries on this date. In evidence, he produced what was purported to be a page of that date from his notebook, showing the sketch and the notation (mis spelling John Kruesi's name) "Kreusi, make this." The document was a phony: Edison inscribed it at a much later date. Whether intentional or not, his backdating would put to rest any rumor that he had been aware of Charles Cros's concept of the phonograph, which had been made public in October. In the following article, the legitimate "original" sketch, with its November 29 date, can be seen.
Josef Hofmann's recording. Although this has no direct bearing on the article at hand, I would like to question another probable myth. The pianist Josef Hofmann, then a boy, is traditionally credited with having made the earliest celebrity recordings, for Edison, in New Jersey, in 1888. Not only have I never seen any evidence of this, but there exist in the files of the Edison National Historic Site two letters from Hofmann to Edison, both sent from Berlin. The first, dated November 24, 1889, be gins, "Do you remember Josef Hofmann the boy-pianist, who was in America? That I am. ... A few days ago, I was at the Urania, to assist to [probably means attend] a performance of your new Phonograf. ... Involuntarily the idea took possession of me: that in this same way, I could also listen to my own playing! How curious that would be, and how useful for my own musical education!" He then requests a machine from Edison. Some how that doesn't sound to me as though he had already made recordings. At any rate, in November 1890, Edison sent Hofmann a phonograph.
In the second letter, dated March 10, 1891, Hofmann thanks Edison for the phonograph and says he is enclosing a recording of "a Scherzo of my composition." Ac cording to a letter Hofmann sent in 1953 to Roland Gelatt, former editor of HIGH FIDELITY, Edison in his reply dubbed it "the very first regular piano record."
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Dr. Young--The Other Thomas
A mine to which every one has since resorted, and contained the original hints of more things since claimed as discoveries, than can perhaps be found in a single production of any known author.
-- comment on his published lectures from Memoir of the Life of Dr. Thomas Young ANON.
Thomas Young's misfortune was that, while he of ten got there first, he seldom stayed there long enough. Credit usually went to those who got there later. The ideal eighteenth -century man, he encompassed a greater variety of subjects in his investigations than Edison did. But it was Young's wide-ranging interests that pulled him into new fields too soon to plow many deeply enough. Just consider the range of his influence: Young revived and established the wave theory of light and discovered the principle of interference; diagnosed the cause of astigmatism; explained the polarization of light waves; contributed to the theory of tides; advanced the mathematical theory of epicycloidal curves; investigated the function of the heart and arteries in circulation; made the first reasoned estimates of molecular size; described and analyzed yellow fever; furthered the theory that one sees colors by fibers in the eye that respond to red, green, and violet; improved the calculation of eclipses; deciphered the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphics; defined a coefficient of elasticity known as Young's modulus; made original studies on diseases of the chest; while still a student, explained how the lens of the eye adjusts itself to focusing at varying distances; and investigated and wrote about music, painting, harmonic theory, sound, light, capillarity, spiders, and the atmosphere of the moon.
Young was born on June 13, 1773, in Milverton, Somerset, England, the eldest of his Quaker parents' ten children. He read fluently at two and by age four was able to recite Latin poetry, not a word of which he understood. A neighbor of the family, a surveyor, befriended the boy at eight and took him out into the country on some surveying trips. The mathematics involved fascinated the child and, he was to indicate later, influenced the course of his life.
In school he learned Greek and Latin; in order to read a classmate's books from Paris, he taught himself French and Italian; when a dinner-table conversation brought up the problem of whether there was as much difference in Oriental languages as in European, he further taught himself Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic. And all this before he was fourteen.
Young's interests turned to botany, but he had no microscope. He decided to build one himself and, in order to understand the optician's algebraic formulas necessary to grind his own lenses, taught himself differential calculus.
At twenty he read a paper on vision to the Royal Society of London, his country's most prestigious scientific body, and the following year he was elected a fellow. Meanwhile, Young was studying to be a doctor in England and Germany, and in 1795, at twenty-two, he received his M.D. degree from Gottingen. He became professor of physics at the Royal Institute in 1801 and lectured there with Sir Humphry Davy.
Although he established himself as a physician in London, he never had much of a practice, since he devoted most of his time to other studies. In fact, he had to publish the bulk of his writings anonymously, so that his patients wouldn't think he was wasting his time on irrelevant matters.
In 1814 the Rosetta Stone, that precious monolith containing inscriptions of the same text in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphics, came to Young's attention. The stone had been studied for a generation in an unsuccessful attempt to translate the Egyptian hieroglyphs. For millennia, scholars and laymen alike had assumed that each symbol represented some idea or thing. By now Young had increased his knowledge of languages to include Ethiopic, Coptic, and Turkish. He made the critical breakthrough in determining that at least some of the hieroglyphs were phonetic and, in so doing, established that the group of symbols within cartouches, or boxes, were proper names; he deciphered some of them, as well as the symbols representing numbers, and saw how plurals were constructed. After making that first break in the code, he characteristically left the field.
Jean Francois Champollion, who came in where Young left off and cracked the code wide open, was of course given the credit. As Helmholtz was for his furtherance of the idea that color is perceived by nerves in the retina sensitive to three colors. As the French physicists Fresnel and Arago were for convincing Europe of the validity of the wave theory of light. As Edison was for the phonograph. And who knows how many et ceteras belong here? In his spare time Young became an expert acrobat, ropedancer, and equestrian, vying with the local circuses in demonstrating such feats as riding two horses at once. He gave up the practice of medicine at forty-five when he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the National Almanac. In 1827, two years before his death, the French honored him by electing him one of only eight foreign members of the Royal Institute of France. Young died on May 10, 1829, just short of age fifty-six, of "ossification of the aorta."
L.M.
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(High Fidelity, Jan. 1977)
Also see:
The Parallel Careers of Edison and Bell; James A. Drake; Geniuses in sometime contact--and conflict
Edison as Record Producer; Bridget Paolucci; His recording stars remember