metal, set up roughly on an iron stand about a foot square.”
So enchanted were the editors that Edison was given credit for solving what had been seen as two separate problems, decoding the sound notations (misunderstood as “dots and dashes”) that were recorded on the tinfoil, and then re-creating them. It was as if instead of having to read the individual words, one could drop a book in a machine and it would automatically read itself. In fact, Edison could not decode the scratches, and had failed in his attempt to solve the first problem, that is, translating the microscopic marks into a phonetic alphabet. But there was no need for anyone to break the recording down into analyzable units; the phonograph automatically played whatever had been recorded, blithely insensible to differences in language, equally articulate in all tongues. It was already possible to project life-sized stereoscopic images of an individual upon a screen. “Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices,” the journal suggested, “and it will be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.” This was stop-the-presses news.
Scientific American,
which had been ready to publish its regular issue on the day of the talking phonograph’s visit, delayed publication one day so that an illustrated account could be inserted, a fact that pleased Johnson exceedingly.
Thanks to
Scientific American,
Edison would never again enjoy the sweetness of anonymous obscurity. “I want to know you right bad,” the
New York Sun
’s Amos Cummings wrote him in early January, in quest of “something about the secrets of electricity and so on.” Edison welcomed Cummings, and William Croffut of the
New York Daily Graphic,
making them feel as if they were not just reporters but friends. Edwin Fox, of the influential
New York Herald,
was an old acquaintance who had originally known Edison when they were both telegraph operators; Edison granted him and other former operators access, too. The sensational news of the phonograph’s performance—so wondrous that the fact that the phonograph was wholly mechanical and had no electrical components or power was often overlooked—brought the press to Edison’s doorstep, and he, in turn, intuitively cultivated the relationships, using the press’s hunger for more sensational discoveries for his own ends.
The technique that Edison used most effectively in handling the press was the seemingly offhand disclosure about what he had discovered, leaving the impression that he was parting the curtain only enough to provide a glimpse of what he had actually achieved and withholding the remainder from public view. He left it to the reporters to draw their own conclusions. The
New York World
referred to Edison’s telephone transmitter and speaking telephone, the electric pen and a sewing-machine prototype that was powered by tuning forks, as “a few selected from hundreds equally curious and of more or less practical importance.” When the newspaper estimated the number was “hundreds,” and regarded all to be equally significant, it was in effect creating a superhero, a man who was only thirty years old, lifted up to a plane above his contemporaries, including Alexander Graham Bell.
One cannot help but feel a little sympathy for Bell in the competition between the two men. The acclaim for his telephone was quickly superseded by the attention that Edison’s improvements drew, and then by Edison’s phonograph. This was especially galling because Bell had come so close to inventing the phonograph himself. He had understood how sound waves could be recorded on paper, and he also knew that the motion of one’s hand could generate waves that produced similar sounds. Indenting a medium to save and then reproduce those waves had not occurred to him, however. “It is a most astonishing thing to me that I could possibly have let this invention slip through my fingers,” Bell said in early 1878. He
So enchanted were the editors that Edison was given credit for solving what had been seen as two separate problems, decoding the sound notations (misunderstood as “dots and dashes”) that were recorded on the tinfoil, and then re-creating them. It was as if instead of having to read the individual words, one could drop a book in a machine and it would automatically read itself. In fact, Edison could not decode the scratches, and had failed in his attempt to solve the first problem, that is, translating the microscopic marks into a phonetic alphabet. But there was no need for anyone to break the recording down into analyzable units; the phonograph automatically played whatever had been recorded, blithely insensible to differences in language, equally articulate in all tongues. It was already possible to project life-sized stereoscopic images of an individual upon a screen. “Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices,” the journal suggested, “and it will be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.” This was stop-the-presses news.
Scientific American,
which had been ready to publish its regular issue on the day of the talking phonograph’s visit, delayed publication one day so that an illustrated account could be inserted, a fact that pleased Johnson exceedingly.
Thanks to
Scientific American,
Edison would never again enjoy the sweetness of anonymous obscurity. “I want to know you right bad,” the
New York Sun
’s Amos Cummings wrote him in early January, in quest of “something about the secrets of electricity and so on.” Edison welcomed Cummings, and William Croffut of the
New York Daily Graphic,
making them feel as if they were not just reporters but friends. Edwin Fox, of the influential
New York Herald,
was an old acquaintance who had originally known Edison when they were both telegraph operators; Edison granted him and other former operators access, too. The sensational news of the phonograph’s performance—so wondrous that the fact that the phonograph was wholly mechanical and had no electrical components or power was often overlooked—brought the press to Edison’s doorstep, and he, in turn, intuitively cultivated the relationships, using the press’s hunger for more sensational discoveries for his own ends.
The technique that Edison used most effectively in handling the press was the seemingly offhand disclosure about what he had discovered, leaving the impression that he was parting the curtain only enough to provide a glimpse of what he had actually achieved and withholding the remainder from public view. He left it to the reporters to draw their own conclusions. The
New York World
referred to Edison’s telephone transmitter and speaking telephone, the electric pen and a sewing-machine prototype that was powered by tuning forks, as “a few selected from hundreds equally curious and of more or less practical importance.” When the newspaper estimated the number was “hundreds,” and regarded all to be equally significant, it was in effect creating a superhero, a man who was only thirty years old, lifted up to a plane above his contemporaries, including Alexander Graham Bell.
One cannot help but feel a little sympathy for Bell in the competition between the two men. The acclaim for his telephone was quickly superseded by the attention that Edison’s improvements drew, and then by Edison’s phonograph. This was especially galling because Bell had come so close to inventing the phonograph himself. He had understood how sound waves could be recorded on paper, and he also knew that the motion of one’s hand could generate waves that produced similar sounds. Indenting a medium to save and then reproduce those waves had not occurred to him, however. “It is a most astonishing thing to me that I could possibly have let this invention slip through my fingers,” Bell said in early 1878. He
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