the+phonograph+of+edison

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Automotive engineering, Electricity, Electronics and information technology, Metallurgy, Photography, film and optics, Public utilities, Recording, Telecommunications

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He was the son of Samuel Edison, who was in the timber business. His schooling was delayed due to scarlet fever until 1855, when he was 8½ years old, but he was an avid reader. By the age of 14 he had a job as a newsboy on the railway from Port Huron to Detroit, a distance of sixty-three miles (101 km). He worked a fourteen-hour day with a stopover of five hours, which he spent in the Detroit Free Library. He also sold sweets on the train and, later, fruit and vegetables, and was soon making a profit of $20 a week. He then started two stores in Port Huron and used a spare freight car as a laboratory. He added a hand-printing press to produce 400 copies weekly of The Grand Trunk Herald, most of which he compiled and edited himself. He set himself to learn telegraphy from the station agent at Mount Clements, whose son he had saved from being run over by a freight car.

At the age of 16 he became a telegraphist at Port Huron. In 1863 he became railway telegraphist at the busy Stratford Junction of the Grand Trunk Railroad, arranging a clock with a notched wheel to give the hourly signal which was to prove that he was awake and at his post! He left hurriedly after failing to hold a train which was nearly involved in a head-on collision. He usually worked the night shift, allowing himself time for experiments during the day. His first invention was an arrangement of two Morse registers so that a high-speed input could be decoded at a slower speed. Moving from place to place he held many positions as a telegraphist. In Boston he invented an automatic vote recorder for Congress and patented it, but the idea was rejected. This was the first of a total of 1180 patents that he was to take out during his lifetime. After six years he resigned from the Western Union Company to devote all his time to invention, his next idea being an improved ticker-tape machine for stockbrokers. He developed a duplex telegraphy system, but this was turned down by the Western Union Company. He then moved to New York.

Edison found accommodation in the battery room of Law's Gold Reporting Company, sleeping in the cellar, and there his repair of a broken transmitter marked him as someone of special talents. His superior soon resigned, and he was promoted with a salary of $300 a month. Western Union paid him $40,000 for the sole rights on future improvements on the duplex telegraph, and he moved to Ward Street, Newark, New Jersey, where he employed a gathering of specialist engineers. Within a year, he married one of his employees, Mary Stilwell, when she was only 16: a daughter, Marion, was born in 1872, and two sons, Thomas and William, in 1876 and 1879, respectively.

He continued to work on the automatic telegraph, a device to send out messages faster than they could be tapped out by hand: that is, over fifty words per minute or so. An earlier machine by Alexander Bain worked at up to 400 words per minute, but was not good over long distances. Edison agreed to work on improving this feature of Bain's machine for the Automatic Telegraph Company (ATC) for $40,000. He improved it to a working speed of 500 words per minute and ran a test between Washington and New York. Hoping to sell their equipment to the Post Office in Britain, ATC sent Edison to England in 1873 to negotiate. A 500-word message was to be sent from Liverpool to London every half-hour for six hours, followed by tests on 2,200 miles (3,540 km) of cable at Greenwich. Only confused results were obtained due to induction in the cable, which lay coiled in a water tank. Edison returned to New York, where he worked on his quadruplex telegraph system, tests of which proved a success between New York and Albany in December 1874. Unfortunately, simultaneous negotiation with Western Union and ATC resulted in a lawsuit.

Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for a telephone in March 1876 while Edison was still working on the same idea. His improvements allowed the device to operate over a distance of hundreds of miles instead of only a few miles. Tests were carried out over the 106 miles (170 km) between New York and Philadelphia. Edison applied for a patent on the carbon-button transmitter in April 1877, Western Union agreeing to pay him $6,000 a year for the seventeen-year duration of the patent. In these years he was also working on the development of the electric lamp and on a duplicating machine which would make up to 3,000 copies from a stencil. In 1876–7 he moved from Newark to Menlo Park, twenty-four miles (39 km) from New York on the Pennsylvania Railway, near Elizabeth. He had bought a house there around which he built the premises that would become his "inventions factory". It was there that he began the use of his 200- page pocket notebooks, each of which lasted him about two weeks, so prolific were his ideas. When he died he left 3,400 of them filled with notes and sketches.

Late in 1877 he applied for a patent for a phonograph which was granted on 19 February 1878, and by the end of the year he had formed a company to manufacture this totally new product. At the time, Edison saw the device primarily as a business aid rather than for entertainment, rather as a dictating machine. In August 1878 he was granted a British patent. In July 1878 he tried to measure the heat from the solar corona at a solar eclipse viewed from Rawlins, Wyoming, but his "tasimeter" was too sensitive.

Probably his greatest achievement was "The Subdivision of the Electric Light" or the "glow bulb". He tried many materials for the filament before settling on carbon. He gave a demonstration of electric light by lighting up Menlo Park and inviting the public. Edison was, of course, faced with the problem of inventing and producing all the ancillaries which go to make up the electrical system of generation and distribution-meters, fuses, insulation, switches, cabling—even generators had to be designed and built; everything was new. He started a number of manufacturing companies to produce the various components needed.

In 1881 he built the world's largest generator, which weighed 27 tons, to light 1,200 lamps at the Paris Exhibition. It was later moved to England to be used in the world's first central power station with steam engine drive at Holborn Viaduct, London. In September 1882 he started up his Pearl Street Generating Station in New York, which led to a worldwide increase in the application of electric power, particularly for lighting. At the same time as these developments, he built a 1,300yd (1,190m) electric railway at Menlo Park.

On 9 August 1884 his wife died of typhoid. Using his telegraphic skills, he proposed to 19-year-old Mina Miller in Morse code while in the company of others on a train. He married her in February 1885 before buying a new house and estate at West Orange, New Jersey, building a new laboratory not far away in the Orange Valley.

Edison used direct current which was limited to around 250 volts. Alternating current was largely developed by George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla, using transformers to step up the current to a higher voltage for long-distance transmission. The use of AC gradually overtook the Edison DC system.

In autumn 1888 he patented a form of cinephotography, the kinetoscope, obtaining film-stock from George Eastman. In 1893 he set up the first film studio, which was pivoted so as to catch the sun, with a hinged roof which could be raised. In 1894 kinetoscope parlours with "peep shows" were starting up in cities all over America. Competition came from the Latham Brothers with a screen-projection machine, which Edison answered with his "Vitascope", shown in New York in 1896. This showed pictures with accompanying sound, but there was some difficulty with synchronization. Edison also experimented with captions at this early date.

In 1880 he filed a patent for a magnetic ore separator, the first of nearly sixty. He bought up deposits of low-grade iron ore which had been developed in the north of New Jersey. The process was a commercial success until the discovery of iron-rich ore in Minnesota rendered it uneconomic and uncompetitive. In 1898 cement rock was discovered in New Village, west of West Orange. Edison bought the land and started cement manufacture, using kilns twice the normal length and using half as much fuel to heat them as the normal type of kiln. In 1893 he met Henry Ford, who was building his second car, at an Edison convention. This started him on the development of a battery for an electric car on which he made over 9,000 experiments. In 1903 he sold his patent for wireless telegraphy "for a song" to Guglielmo Marconi.

In 1910 Edison designed a prefabricated concrete house. In December 1914 fire destroyed three-quarters of the West Orange plant, but it was at once rebuilt, and with the threat of war Edison started to set up his own plants for making all the chemicals that he had previously been buying from Europe, such as carbolic acid, phenol, benzol, aniline dyes, etc. He was appointed President of the Navy Consulting Board, for whom, he said, he made some forty-five inventions, "but they were pigeonholed, every one of them". Thus did Edison find that the Navy did not take kindly to civilian interference.

In 1927 he started the Edison Botanic Research Company, founded with similar investment from Ford and Firestone with the object of finding a substitute for overseas-produced rubber. In the first year he tested no fewer than 3,327 possible plants, in the second year, over 1,400, eventually developing a variety of Golden Rod which grew to 14 ft (4.3 m) in height. However, all this effort and money was wasted, due to the discovery of synthetic rubber.

In October 1929 he was present at Henry Ford's opening of his Dearborn Museum to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the incandescent lamp, including a replica of the Menlo Park laboratory. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and was elected to the American Academy of Sciences. He died in 1931 at his home, Glenmont; throughout the USA, lights were dimmed temporarily on the day of his funeral.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology, Recording

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Of English descent, Smith embarked on an education in mechanical engineering, graduating from West Jersey Academy, Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 1859. In 1863 he established a machine shop in Bridgeton, New Jersey, that became the Ferracute Machine Company in 1877, eventually specializing in the manufacture of presses for metalworking. He seems to have subscribed to design principles considered modern even in the 1990s, "always giving attention to the development of artistic form in combination with simplicity, and with massive strength where required" (bibliographic reference below). He was successful in his business, and developed and patented a large number of mechanical constructions.

Inspired by the advent of the phonograph of Edison, in 1878 Smith obtained the tin-foil mechanical phonograph, analysed its shortcomings and performed some experiments in magnetic recording. He filed a caveat in the US Patent Office in order to be protected while he "reduced the invention to practice". However, he did not follow this trail. When there was renewed interest in practical sound recording and reproduction in 1888 (the constructions of Berliner and Bell \& Tainter), Smith published an account of his experiments in the journal Electrical World. In a corrective letter three weeks later it is clear that he was aware of the physical requirements for the interaction between magnetic coil and magnetic medium, but his publications also indicate that he did not as such obtain reproduction of recorded sound.

Smith did not try to develop magnetic recording, but he felt it imperative that he be given credit for conceiving the idea of it. When accounts of Valdemar Poulsen's work were published in 1900, Smith attempted to prove some rights in the invention in the US Patent Office, but to no avail.

He was a highly respected member of both his community and engineering societies, and in later life became interested in the anti-slavery cause that had also been close to the heart of his parents, as well as in the YMCA movement and in women's suffrage.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Dickson was born in France of English and Scottish parents. As a young man of almost 19 years, he wrote in 1879 to Thomas Edison in America, asking for a job. Edison replied that he was not taking on new staff at that time, but Dickson, with his mother and sisters, decided to emigrate anyway. In 1883 he contacted Edison again, and was given a job at the Goerk Street laboratory of the Edison Electric Works in New York. He soon assumed a position of responsibility as Superintendent, working on the development of electric light and power systems, and also carried out most of the photography Edison required. In 1888 he moved to the Edison West Orange laboratory, becoming Head of the ore-milling department. When Edison, inspired by Muybridge's sequence photographs of humans and animals in motion, decided to develop a motion picture apparatus, he gave the task to Dickson, whose considerable skills in mechanics, photography and electrical work made him the obvious choice. The first experiments, in 1888, were on a cylinder machine like the phonograph, in which the sequence pictures were to be taken in a spiral. This soon proved to be impractical, and work was delayed for a time while Dickson developed a new ore-milling machine. Little progress with the movie project was made until George Eastman's introduction in July 1889 of celluloid roll film, which was thin, tough, transparent and very flexible. Dickson returned to his experiments in the spring of 1891 and soon had working models of a film camera and viewer, the latter being demonstrated at the West Orange laboratory on 20 May 1891. By the early summer of 1892 the project had advanced sufficiently for commercial exploitation to begin. The Kinetograph camera used perforated 35 mm film (essentially the same as that still in use in the late twentieth century), and the kinetoscope, a peep-show viewer, took fifty feet of film running in an endless loop. Full-scale manufacture of the viewers started in 1893, and they were demonstrated on a number of occasions during that year. On 14 April 1894 the first kinetoscope parlour, with ten viewers, was opened to the public in New York. By the end of that year, the kinetoscope was seen by the public all over America and in Europe. Dickson had created the first commercially successful cinematograph system. Dickson left Edison's employment on 2 April 1895, and for a time worked with Woodville Latham on the development of his Panoptikon projector, a projection version of the kinetoscope. In December 1895 he joined with Herman Casier, Henry N.Marvin and Elias Koopman to form the American Mutoscope Company. Casier had designed the Mutoscope, an animated-picture viewer in which the sequences of pictures were printed on cards fixed radially to a drum and were flipped past the eye as the drum rotated. Dickson designed the Biograph wide-film camera to produce the picture sequences, and also a projector to show the films directly onto a screen. The large-format images gave pictures of high quality for the period; the Biograph went on public show in America in September 1896, and subsequently throughout the world, operating until around 1905. In May 1897 Dickson returned to England and set up as a producer of Biograph films, recording, among other subjects, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897, Pope Leo XIII in 1898, and scenes of the Boer War in 1899 and 1900. Many of the Biograph subjects were printed as reels for the Mutoscope to produce the "what the butler saw" machines which were a feature of fairgrounds and seaside arcades until modern times. Dickson's contact with the Biograph Company, and with it his involvement in cinematography, ceased in 1911.

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SUBJECT AREA: Recording

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He manufactured "philosophical devices" in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was approached by Alexander Graham Bell in connection with the construction of toys using sound recordings. A more formal co-operation was agreed, and after Bell's receipt of the French Volta prize in 1880 he financed the Volta Laboratory Association in Washington, DC. He founded this in 1881 together with a cousin and Tainter to develop a practical sound-recording and -reproducing system. Another area that was developed was the transmission of sound by means of modulated light and reception via a selenium cell.

The advances in sound recording and reproduction were very positive, and T.A. Edison was approached in mid-1885 in order to establish co-operation in the further development of a cylinder instrument. In early 1886 the Volta Graphophone Company was incorporated in Virginia, and an experimental laboratory was established in Washington, DC. The investors were connected with the secretarial services at the House of Representatives and needed the development for increasing efficiency in debate reporting. In mid-1887 Edison, against the advice of his collaborators, declined co-operation and went ahead on his own. There is no doubt that Tainter's skill in developing functional equipment and the speed with which he was able to work in the crucial years provoked other developments in the field, in particular the perfection of the Edison phonograph and the development of the disc record by Berliner.

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SUBJECT AREA: Recording

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He was the descendant of a Scottish family who emigrated to France in 1688. He trained as a printer and later became a proof corrector in printing houses catering predominantly for scientific publishers. He became interested in shorthand systems and eventually turned his interest to making a permanent record of sounds in air. At the time it was already known (Young, Duhamel, Wertheim) to record vibrations of bodies. He made a theoretical study and deposited under sealed wrapper a note in the Académie des Sciences on 26 January 1857. He approached the scientific instrument maker Froment and was able to pay for the manufacture of one instrument due to support from the Société d'Encouragement à l'Industrie Nationale. This funding body obtained a positive report from the physicist Lissajous on 6 January 1858. A new model phonautograph was constructed in collaboration with the leading scientific instrument maker in Paris at the time, Rudolph Koenig, and a contract was signed in 1859. The instrument was a success, and Koenig published a collection of traces in 1864.

Although the membrane was parallel to the rotating surface, a primitive lever system generated lateral movements of a bristle which scratched curves in a thin layer of lampblack on the rotating surface. The curves were not necessarily representative of the vibrations in the air. Scott did not imagine the need for reproducing a recorded sound; rather, his intention was to obtain a trace that would lend itself to mathematical analysis and visual recognition of sounds. Obviously the latter did not require the same degree of linearity as the former. When Scott learned that similar apparatus had been built independently in the USA, he requested that his sealed wrapper be opened on 15 July 1861 in order to prove his scientific priority. The contract with Koenig left Scott without influence over his instrument, and eventually he became convinced that everyone else, including Edison in the end, had stolen his invention. Towards the end of his life he became interested mainly in the history of printing, and he was involved in the publishing of a series of books about books.

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SUBJECT AREA: Recording

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After arriving in the USA in 1870 and becoming an American citizen, Berliner worked as a dry-goods clerk in Washington, DC, and for a period studied electricity at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. He invented an improved microphone and set up his own experimental laboratory in Washington, DC. He developed a microphone for telephone use and sold the rights to the Bell Telephone Company. Subsequently he was put in charge of their laboratory, remaining in that position for eight years. In 1881 Berliner, with his brothers Joseph and Jacob, founded the J.Berliner Telephonfabrik in Hanover, the first factory in Europe specializing in telephone equipment.

Inspired by the development work performed by T.A. Edison and in the Volta Laboratory (see C.S. Tainter), he analysed the existing processes for recording and reproducing sound and in 1887 developed a process for transferring lateral undulations scratched in soot into an etched groove that would make a needle and diaphragm vibrate. Using what may be regarded as a combination of the Phonautograph of Léon Scott de Martinville and the photo-engraving suggested by Charles Cros, in May 1887 he thus demonstrated the practicability of the laterally recorded groove. He termed the apparatus "Gramophone". In November 1887 he applied the principle to a glass disc and obtained an inwardly spiralling, modulated groove in copper and zinc. In March 1888 he took the radical step of scratching the lateral vibrations directly onto a rotating zinc disc, the surface of which was protected, and the subsequent etching created the groove. Using well-known principles of printing-plate manufacture, he developed processes for duplication by making a negative mould from which positive copies could be pressed in a thermoplastic compound. Toy gramophones were manufactured in Germany from 1889 and from 1892–3 Berliner manufactured both records and gramophones in the USA. The gramophones were hand-cranked at first, but from 1896 were based on a new design by E.R. Johnson. In 1897–8 Berliner spread his activities to England and Germany, setting up a European pressing plant in the telephone factory in Hanover, and in 1899 a Canadian company was formed. Various court cases over patents removed Berliner from direct running of the reconstructed companies, but he retained a major economic interest in E.R. Johnson's Victor Talking Machine Company. In later years Berliner became interested in aeronautics, in particular the autogiro principle. Applied acoustics was a continued interest, and a tile for controlling the acoustics of large halls was successfully developed in the 1920s.

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