I got so involved last month with Charles Cros of France, the man who conceived
of the phonograph some eight months before Thomas A. Edison independently invented
it, that never got to some nagging little mechanical questions about Edison's
First Phonograph which, in this 100th anniversary year, have been bothering
me as never before. Not very epochal questions-just minor tantalizations.
trot them out, even so, because they illustrate a big point about our informational
system, that vast transmission belt of second-hand knowledge that makes up
maybe 95 percent of our dayto-day reality. Do we trust anything first-hand?
It's got so the things we find out for ourselves, right on the spot, aren't
as real to us as that omniscient Voice of Authority that comes to us over
the air or in print.
In other words, if the weather people say it's fair outside and you see
the rain, there must be something wrong.
With the rain, of course.
I have no first-hand experience with the First Phonograph nor have most
of us. It's right there, in New Jersey. But you don't just walk in and ask
to turn its crank, just to hear the sound that comes out. Like the Declaration
of Independence, that machine is now a well -guarded and priceless relic
and rightly so. So you read about it. You look at pictures and study diagrams,
as who hasn't, this 100th year.
It's all second hand. And the trouble is, when I do this I find holes in
the info. Silly little things that in a half second first-hand look I could
answer for myself-but no! I have to depend on the transmission belt. Drives
me crazy.
So what more do we need to know about Edison? His machine worked. It had
a stylus and grooves, it recorded and it played back, no doubt with execrable
quality. Isn't that enough? No, not enough, at least until my curiosity is
satisfied.
A Question of Curiosity
Question One. Not really a question, since I have figured out the answer-but
I'll bet nine -tenths of our readers won't know. Without looking at a picture
of the First Phonograph, can you say whether the big cylinder turns along
a stationary threaded shaft, to make the spiral groove pattern, or the cylinder
and shaft are one and turn together. I had never thought about it, natch.
Well, the cylinder and shaft are one. That you can figure out by study of
the pictures.
OK, then does the cylinder move sidewise, or does the stylus and its diaphragm
assembly (two of these, one for recording and the other for playback)? Well,
I can tell you that one too; the cylinder moves sidewise and so does the
shaft with it. The shaft is threaded at one end, next to the crank, and screws
through the threaded support on that side. On the other side the shaft is
unthreaded and moves freely through the smooth bearing hole in the second
support.
The styli remain in one place as the cylinder winds past them.
Simple-but note that in later cylinder machines the system was reversed,
if I am right. The cylinder turned in one position while the stylus and diaphragm
moved sidewise along a sort of threaded track.
Or so I remember.
(My second-hand info, via numerous pictures, is exasperatingly uninformative
on this score, as usual, but I think I can make out the traveling stylus,
moveable along an overhead screw.) Now this involves some interesting mechanical
analogies with present audio equipment tricky motion problems that are directly
related to those we face in our overhead -type tangential disc cutters and
playback systems. How do you persuade a relatively heavy "carriage",
the sonic mechanism plus stylus, to slip sidewise so that the groove is accurately
traced in playback without even the tiniest side pull? Those who have designed
such systems know all about it-and there are even more recent developments
such as the ingenious Teldec TV disc system with its dangling stylus and
those "motional feedback" arrangements that give the traveling
crane a nudge when it goes too slowly. And on top of all this, there's the
RCA laser beam tracking system.
All these mechanisms trace directly back to the very first instant of recorded
sound in 1877. The sidewise tracking problem was solved, right there, at
least for the moment! Otherwise imagine the sad result: "Mary had a
little lamb whose lamb whose lamb whose lamb whose lamb---". Which brings
forth a slightly more cogent question. So Edison wrapped tinfoil around a
brass cylinder, one in which his stylus embossed or indented a vertical audio
signal. Did that cylinder have pre-cut grooves already on it? (Or did the
stylus press its own spiral groove onto the foil as the cylinder moved?)
Well, I have deduced the answer to that one, too; but look: I have two authoritative
pictures of the First Phonograph and they disagree emphatically on this.
They are in fact the same photograph, or at least taken at precisely the
same angle. But in those days the folks liked to retouch their pictures for
greater impact. One of these pictures shows a smooth cylinder. The other
shows a cylinder with grooves cut in it.
Wouldn'tcha know. That's secondhand info for you. And Roland Gelatt, in
his "Fabulous Phonograph," unintentionally makes for more confusion
by writing that "a piece of tinfoil was to be wrapped around the cylinder
(with a fine spiral groove impressed on the surface) and two diaphragm-and-needle
units..." Impressed on WHICH surface, Roland? The tinfoil or
the cylinder itself?
Photographic Fallacy
Actually, I can infer (not having seen with my own eyes) that indeed there
are pre-cut groovings on the brass cylinder-retouched out by some idiot in
one of those photographs-and thus the wrapped tinfoil lay over these, the
stylus gently pressing the foil into the V-shaped space beneath. Tricky,
come to think of it, and typical of Edison's fine-tuned thinking, in an area,
remember, where no soul on earth had experimented before. It's clear that
the precut grooves were not intended for tracking but were a part of the
actual embossing system. Would you have thought of it? It was surely a much
better idea than forcing the stylus against a flat, non -grooved hard surface
beneath the foil.
A baffling unanswered question for me is the tinfoil itself. First--was
it tin foil? Made of tin? This was before the days of aluminum, which if
it was known at all was then an extremely scarce metal, the electrical reduction
process from bauxite not yet having been invented. So-what are the properties
of tinfoil, if different from aluminum? If we were to reconstruct an Edison
machine today, could we use aluminum foil as an authentic substitute? Probably.
Yet in my mind a nagging little doubt remains, maybe not? We would need more
info, firsthand.
Now comes the tinfoil clincher.
How, if you please, do you go about "wrapping around" a sheet
of tinfoil? Shades of a thousand Xmas packages, all crinkled up and crumpled!
How do you wrap a flat sheet of tinfoil so that on a cylinder it will turn
nicely and evenly under a stylus with never a wrinkle or fold? To me, mostly
a man of many thumbs, this is unimaginable.
I'd have to see it done, first-hand, before my eyes. (As Edison said, only
an "expert" could get results out of his first phonograph. Maybe
the foil was the problem.) But there is a further problem, about which I
have never heard a single word, a matter of sheer topology. How do you convert
a flat, finite rectangle into a seamless cylinder or tube? You can't, short
of welding and polishing down.
Therefore, in all my second-handedness, I am assuming that the Edison phonograph
played with an audible fast tick, tick, tick as the stylus passed repeatedly
over the tinfoil joint. What else? Well, maybe it was just a nice, soft purr,
tinfoil (aluminum?) being so smooth and impressionable? But that again raises
questions about metal characteristics. Hardness, ductility.
My second-hand library on the First Phonograph says precisely nothing.
No help at all. In any case, one would have to overlap the foil the right
way, so the stylus would move from the top layer onto the lower-otherwise
the point would surely rip the whole thing off the cylinder on the first
revolution. Or would it? Perhaps the tinfoil would smooth itself to a near
soundless joint, which might have been Edison's canny thought ahead of time.
Just like him.
But, of course, that brings back again the matter of the choice of metal.
Was tin actually the best, or just a handy choice? How about silver or lead
foil? Old Tom was never one to bypass a possible candidate. The differing
metallic properties obviously must make some difference. How about gold leaf?
Expensive--but the Edison laboratory used all sorts of exotic metals, notably
in the electric light filament experiments of the very next year. Platinum,
tungsten. So perhaps gold foil might have been used, if it worked well. Or
scarce aluminum.
Phono "Printing Press"
Speaking of topology, I have a little whopper of a similar question that
has to do with the same sort of change of shape in a different aspect of
the phonograph. As we all know, the tinfoil cylinder was soon replaced by
cylinders of wax, removable, on which the stylus directly pressed its vertical
groove. (No longer any need for the pre-cut grooves, wax being soft.) When
Emile Berliner worked out the flat disc and the lateral-modulated groove-at
first etched by acid instead of cut or embossed, due to patent restrictions-he
also hit upon an enormously important principle, the key to the future audio
industry, no less than the mass production stamper system for multiple duplication
of recordings, a phono "printing press". Now it is astonishing
that for a number of years of heavy competition between the cylinder and
the disc, the newer disc records were "published" on a mass scale
whereas every single cylinder was individually cut in its wax, aided only
by a pantograph system whereby a few cylinders could be cut simultaneously
while the performers did their thing. Thus-popular items had to be re-performed
live sometimes hundreds of times on end in order to meet the market demand.
Even the use of two or three machines (the maximum, due to close-up recording
horns) didn't do much to help. So, oddly, the cylinders of that era, the
1890s, are not in fact identical for a given catalogue item but contain different
performances, which adds spice and variety to the reproduced sound. Something
we could use today. (Editor's Note: Talk about your direct -to -disc process!)
The topological problem was again the shape of a cylinder and its endless
circular "plane," like an Einstein time warp. It could not be broken
by any sort of joint. And nobody could figure a way to "press" that
sort of baffling shape. The problem wasn't solved until 1901, and meanwhile
the disc people were stamping out their crude but multiple-pressed duplicates
in vast quantities. Curious situation. Reminds us of tape vs. disc today,
where tape still can only be copied and copied for publication, if from a
single master recording.
Finally, as Roland Gelatt cryptically puts it, "a successful process
for molding cylinders was perfected." Period. No further explanation.
Circle of Confusion
Now all I ask is HOW? To this very moment, though I've heard and seen plenty
of wax cylinders and still have a few lying around, I am unable to figure
out how they were made-how that virgin expanse of grooving was molded free
of faults. If you pour liquid material into a circular slot mold with grooves
on its outer segment, how do you get the product out? If the mold were to
come apart in sections, there would be joint marks and audible breaks in
the grooving. If they matched up at all. On the other hand, if the mold comes
away all in one piece, it has to expand, grow larger, if it is to break free
of the groove surface. (You couldn't have the record itself shrink-that would
make it play sharp.) I somehow keep thinking of the (non -disc) brake linings
on my car; is the cylinder mold external -expanding? Well, of course I know
that cylinders can be molded, and were molded for a quarter century. But
nobody's second-hand info has yet given me the slightest idea as to how.
That's a typical information hole for you.
P.S. A brilliant idea: how about Babbitt metal foil? Nice and slippery.
(Source: Audio magazine, Jun. 1977, )
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