Cylinders and sound recording/reproduction 1877
Cylinders and sound recording/reproduction
November 29, 1877 - ‘The Invention Factory’, located at Menlo Park, some 25 miles away from New York City. John Kruesi, an expert technician was busy making a novel machine as per the drawing given by his master, Thomas Alva Edison. The cost of the machine was mentioned around - $18 with the remark - ‘This should talk’. Many colleagues laughed while watching John working on this machine made up of brass and iron cylinders, diamond stylii and arrangements made for rotating these cylinders. Most funny thing was a metal cone (like a horn) with tiny needle at the narrow end.
Soon the machine was ready and Edison entered the laboratory for its inspection. He was very pleased with the workmanship of his technician. He wrapped a tin-foil around the curved surface of the cylinder tightly, placed the diamond stylus gently at one end of the foil. Using the handle on right, he began to rotate the cylinder gently but at somewhat uniform speed. Ensuring that the needle is cutting uniform groove in the tinfoil, he then shouted in the horn - reciting the famous nursery rhyme:
"Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go"
Everyone was watching breathlessly. Edison was pleased to see that his shouting has produced zig-zag grooves in the tin foil of one foot long cylinder. He then brought the horn and the needle in the original starting position, changed the stylus, placed the needle in the newly formed grooves and began to rotate the cylinder as before. Initially, lot of noise came out of the horn. As the needle began to pass through the zigzag groove, feeble voice of Edison came out distinctly reciting back the same nursery rhyme that he had shouted (due to his partial deafness since childhood) in the horn a minute ago.
All the persons present in the laboratory were stunned. Edison himself could not believe, since it was a rare occasion that the experiment was successful in the very first attempt. With great enthusiasm and vigor, they worked very hard, made improved versions of the machine and repeated the experiment number of times for confirming its reproducibility. On 6th December 1877 he rushed to the Patent ofiice in New York with his machine and filed claim for the patent. On December 22, 1877 he demonstrated this machine in the office of Scientific American and this journal reported this discovery to the rest of the world. Once again, Edison had proved himself to be what some journalist used to call him - ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park’. On January 19, 1878 he received the patent for the invention of his cylinder phonograph. Edison wrote in his diary ‘The machine does not have much value’.
The invention was shelved for over ten years and in June 1888, he worked for seventy-two hours without sleep working on his improved model of phonograph which had a battery operated motor for attaining the uniform speed. Later until 1911, he improved upon the models, founded Edison Phonograph Company but never liked his invention used for the entertainment purposes. Around the same time, Hester Bell and Charles Tainter did some improvements in Edison’s tin-foil phonograph. These were the evolutionary changes to make machine more suitable for storing messages, letters etc. Nobody including Edison realised the hidden commercial and entertainment potential in this invention at that time.
When did the first cylinder phonograph came to India ? There are several stories and a detailed account has been given by Amitabha Ghosh in The Record News - TRN - 1999. pp.73-97. As per this article, the first demonstration of the cylinder phonograph was around December 1878 (within a year of its invention) at Calcutta. The oldest dealer of HMV in Delhi, Maharaj Lal & Co was founded in 1895. At that time they were selling cylinder records. These looked like a stack of bangles worn by women, and hence common man named them as ‘Bangles’ and the music from the records as ‘sound from bangles’. Professor H Bose, the renowned businessman of Calcutta, entered into this new business of cylinder records under the banner of ‘H Bose Records’ and later ‘Pathe-H Bose Records’. His catalogue of 1906, lists number of cylinder recordings of Rabindranath Tagore. Most of these have been lost to history except the Bande Mataram sung by Rabindranath Tagore. Cylinder records were in market until 1906-10, even at the same time as the single and double side flat discs of the Gramophone and Nicole companies. Although there is no systematic catalogue found so far, it is believed that several hundreds of cylinders were recorded both privately and commercially. Unfortunately, no working cylinder machine or cylinder is found with any collector in India so far. Some of the museums and archives have stored broken, worn out machines and cylinders in the showcases as antique pieces.
