Before Thomas Edison unveiled his speaking phonograph in 1877, another instrument had already begun to make automatic records of spoken language. The concept was quite simple: someone would talk into a funnel with a membrane at the other end while a stylus attached to the membrane traced its motions onto a moving sheet of paper…
In the latter half of 1895, newspapers around the United States relayed the startling news that a phonograph had just conducted a funeral service in place of a live clergyman. The very idea of putting a machine to such a use grated with some critics’ sensibilities, and even the Phonoscope, a trade journal ordinarily eager…
This is the story of the first selection ever listed in a phonograph record catalog, and it is also the story of one private phonograph enthusiast’s efforts to obtain some good records from Edison’s laboratory at the very dawn of the recording industry. It begins on 20 September 1889. Nathaniel Edward Smith, age thirty-four, was…
During the third annual convention of local phonograph companies held at Chicago in the summer of 1892, a roll call was taken to determine which companies with representatives in attendance were then “making musical records.” Many of the positive responses come as no surprise today: serious historians of the early recording industry have long been…
In 1901, Berthold Laufer recorded Chinese music and drama using two phonographs at the same time, one for vocals and one for instruments. Today we can combine the resulting pairs of recordings in stereo, and I’ll be sharing a few examples below, together with an explanation of how I prepared them. Laufer’s pairs of simultaneously…
During 1901 and 1902, a story circulated in newspapers around the United States and beyond in which a couple whose wedding plans had been dashed when the bride was placed under quarantine went ahead and got married by phonograph, with the bride and groom speaking their parts of the ceremony separately. This story was usually…
The story goes like this: Eugene Oscar Mohr Haberacker of Pennsylvania learned about the phonautograph in the late 1850s while attending Allentown Seminary (now Muhlenberg College) and went on to build one of his own which he used for giving demonstrations as a schoolteacher in Tyrone. Then, when news of Thomas Edison’s speaking phonograph broke…
Media historians tend not to think much of the use of the phonograph for secretarial dictation—the scenario where someone talks into it so that someone else can copy the recorded words onto paper afterwards. Maybe that’s because they see it as a misguided focus of nineteenth-century promoters, a dead end from which the phonograph needed…
How often did recording artists visit recording laboratories to make records during the earliest phase of the recording industry, back in the late nineteenth century? How much did they get paid each time? Who were their piano accompanists, and how much did they get paid? What were the salaries of the recordists and other staff?…
A forgotten North Carolina inventor named James Davis seems to have played a significant role in the early history of sound recording, but it’s tantalizingly unclear just what that role was. My interest in Davis was sparked by a historical essay on the telephone published in the London Electrician in 1883. The author of this…
