Audio
(ENG) Tinfoil Phonographs (310)
Transcript
NARRATOR—This Embossing and Translating Telegraph recorded messages by embossing, or indenting them in Morse Code on waxed-paper discs. The machine could then replay them over multiple telegraph lines. This represents one link in the progression of ideas that led Edison to the phonograph. His assistant, Charles Batchelor, remembered that Mr. Edison made the crucial leap while working with a telephone diaphragm: one of the thin, vibrating sheets used in receivers. You’ll see a diaphragm with a stylus attached to it on the next machine.
This is the first phonograph, from 1877—the one Edison tested by speaking the nursery rhyme, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” As sound waves shook the diaphragm, the stylus indented patterns on the revolving foil cylinder. The operator then switched to a playback stylus, which retraced the pattern.
[SOUND—JERRY FABRIS TO RECORD THE FOLLOWING ON A TINFOIL PHONOGRAPH.]
JERRY FABRIS—Hi, this is Jerry Fabris, the Museum Curator of sound recordings. I recorded these words on a replica tinfoil phonograph. Edison’s original sounded something like this.
NARRATOR— The third machine in this group is an improved Edison phonograph from 1878. It’s called the “Brady Model,” because Edison had his portrait taken with this machine, or an identical prototype, at the studio of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady. The phonograph made Thomas Edison a household name at age 30. The press proclaimed him “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”
Description
English audio guide for Tinfoil Phonographs, #310
Date Created
01/01/2007
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