Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Read Free Page B

own clumsy experiments. He eventually constructed a loose-contact transmitter, which increased the volume coming through the mouthpiece. Bell bought the patent and hired Berliner into his research unit.
    There was a third man watching—Thomas Edison. Now that Bell’s telephone was poised to bring upheaval to the telegraph industry, Edison reasoned that there might be a new market for vocal telegrams, replacing the old system of textual telegrams. He tried to build a keyboard telephone, a sort of typewriter capable of playing recordings.
    Like Berliner, Edison had no academic discipline. He had been home-schooled by his mother in a small town in Ohio, then started working at the age of twelve selling sweets and newspapers on the railway lines. His entry into the world of science happened by accident when one day he saved a stationmaster’s son from being killed by a runaway train. As a sign of gratitude, he was given a job as a telegraph operator for Western Union. Working the night shifts, Edison conducted his own experiments until he got fired for spilling acid that leaked through the floor onto his boss’s desk. Thanks to the sale of his Quadruplex system to Western Union in 1874, he made $10,000 before the age of thirty. With this windfall he set up a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he conducted experiments into sound, light, and wireless telegraphy simultaneously.
    In the frantic months after Bell’s telephone went public, Edison stumbled on a novel idea for recording sound. Because he was partly deaf, he fixed a needle to the telephone diaphragm. As it vibrated, he could feel volume levels as pinpricks. As he tinkered with this method, he realized that if modulating sound could vibrate a needle, it could indent paper and perhaps record messages the way the telegraph punched holes in a tape. His design used a needle on a revolving cylinder to engrave the sound waves.
    His stroke of genius was to realize that if you could write sound, by reversing the action, the sound would be reproduced. Nobody, including the brilliant Bell, had yet realized that the giant ear on a phonoautograph could be reversed into a sound horn.
    In late 1877, Edison shouted a nursery rhyme into his phonograph prototype. To his utter amazement, it played back the first time. Coincidentally, on April 30 a French poet by the name of Charles Cros, deposited a design for a sound reproduction device with the Science Academy in Paris, six months before Edison applied for his patent in America. It’s reasonable to assume that the idea of sound reproduction was in the air. The two designs were, however, fundamentally different. The Frenchman’s idea was for a revolving disc containing a spiral of laterally cut sound engravings.
    The Cros design, also called a phonograph , remained unopened in an archive in Paris while Edison was developing his own machine. In December, Cros demanded that his sealed letter be opened and publicly read, suggesting that news of Edison’s invention had reached Paris very quickly.
    In that winter of 1877, American newspapers were reporting Edison’s discovery of a talking machine , the popular moniker for all future record players. When he was invited to the White House to show his invention to President Rutherford B. Hayes, speculation began that the gadget might be a hoax. One day Edison got a surprise visit from the influential Bishop John Heyl Vincent, who shouted a flood of obscure biblical references into the trumpet. When the phonograph played back the crazy recording, the bishop declared, “I am satisfied, now. There isn’t a man in the United States who could recite those names with the same rapidity.”
    Despite the curiosity it aroused, Edison’s talking machine did not attract any investors. Fortunately for Edison, his electric lightbulb flicked on a few months later. Backed by J. P. Morgan and members of the Vanderbilt family, he formed the Edison Electric Light Company and predicted, “We will