In case you didn’t know, Philipp Reis invented an electric telephone in 1861. The big question has always been, as Silvanus Thompson puts it in an exhaustively researched biography published in 1883, “not whether Reis invented a telephone—that is not denied—but whether he invented the Telephone” (p. 36). The title of Thompson’s book is Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone,…
It’s common practice to use a single still image to represent a motion picture (in the common sense of a “moving” picture presented on a screen over time). A “moving” picture can’t be printed as such on ordinary paper using ordinary methods to illustrate an academic journal article or the cover of a book or…
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…
Digital face averaging has been a perennial topic on this blog, and in this post I’d like to share some of my latest results, which I think far outmatch what I was able to do just ten months ago. I’ll discuss techniques below, but let’s start by letting the images speak for themselves. Click on…
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…
As the “world’s most mysterious book,” the Voynich Manuscript is like an inkblot test: whatever people make of it tends to reveal more about them than it does about the manuscript itself. Its study shares resonances with pareidolia, akin to seeing recognizable shapes in clouds or wood grains, and with the Law of the Instrument,…
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…
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