THE GRAMOPHONE AND THE END OF INNOCENCE

The history of singing (though not yet the singing itself) changed fundamentally and for ever at the end of the nineteenth century with the serendipitous series of technological breakthroughs that led to machines being able to capture the sound of the human voice. This turned out to be a revolution, ultimately leading to vocal immortality for all who would like it (and some who would not), but the story of its faltering beginnings is one of bizarre ironies and what seem in hindsight to have been wasted opportunities. Thomas Edison was an extraordinarily creative inventor and entrepreneur but was easily side-tracked from whatever his current enthusiasm happened to be. This divergence occurred at two important points in the gramophone’s history. The original recording machines which famously repeated Edison’s ‘hullo’ and subsequently spouted ‘Mary had a little lamb’ were a byproduct of his attempts to speed up transmission of telegraph messages through the transatlantic cable. In the 1870s he was working on a means of transcribing Morse code telegrams on to paper tape. The indentations produced could be read and repeated at much higher speeds for onward transmission or storage. The sound of this whirring paper tape happened to remind the increasingly deaf inventor of a human voice. This sound, which actually had nothing at all to do with voices but was simply caused by fast-running paper tape with dents in it, inspired the imaginative leap in Edison which resulted in his applying the same principle to the vibrations produced by a voice. He first made a machine which would record the vibrations of speech on to paraffin paper, and then in 1877 he asked his assistant John Kruesi to build a device which used a needle and tin foil to reproduce its inventor’s celebrated nursery rhyme recitation. The new process was greeted as something almost magical by those who heard the first phonographs, but it turned out to have a short life.