Early soound

arly Phonograph Culture and Moving Pictures Ian Christie

It has long been recognized that the phonograph provided a prototype for the whole family of late-nineteenth-century spatio-temporal reproduction machines and practices, including moving pictures. From the inventor’s side, we have Edison’s celebrated claim in 1888 that his new instrument would “do for the eye what the Phonograph has done for the ear”—a phrase at once typically self-promoting and visionary.1 But equally important for future developments was the growth of a business of promoting and selling sound recording equipment that effectively started in that same year. For it was in 1888 that Edison launched the third version of his original apparatus, now known as the Perfected Phonograph, and in competition with the Bell-Tainter “Graphophone,” developed in Washington by the Volta Laboratory, which had been set up by Alexander Graham Bell with prize money awarded to him by the French government in 1880. Shortly after the agents of Edison and Volta set about publicizing their rival machines, a first generation of entrepreneurs started exploiting them. One of these, no doubt typical of many, was the future distributor and producer Charles Urban, who records in his memoirs how, around 1893, he “booked vocal and Instrumental Concerts via Schools and private Parties at $10 per evening.”2 Other pioneers of this new business worked the fairs, charging an audience to listen to this latest technological marvel: one such fairground exhibitor was Charles Pathé, soon to launch the first vertically integrated international film company. There must have been many more who also made the transition into moving pictures, albeit less successfully.3 For, as we know from Charles Musser and Carol Nelson’s invaluable work on one traveling showman, Lyman Howe, there were others who combined sound and picture presentation, through at least the first decade of the century.4

Yet if it is readily conceded that the phonograph business provided a useful advance model for the moving picture business, a still more fundamental group of questions remain: What was the attraction of recording sound? What kinds of uses were envisaged and essayed, once the technology existed? One of the earliest and most persistent ideas was undoubtedly the “talking book,” which we find at the end of the seventeenth century in Cyrano de Bergerac’s satirical account of a visit to the moon.5 This gained a new impetus with the development of modern mercantile culture in the early nineteenth century, which also prompted Isaac Pitman to develop his shorthand system in 1837, based on the principle of notating sound rather than orthography. Soon after came the telegraph, the first versions of the telephone (from 1860), and the phonograph—a closely linked sequence of inventions that established Edison’s reputation.6

One of the first domestic uses proposed for the phonograph was in fact to record telephone callers’ messages, widely considered intrusive due to their unpredictability. Carolyn Marvin quotes a contribution to an 1893 Ideal Home competition in Answers, which foresaw “phonographs for communicated messages fixed to front and back door.”7 Earlier, in 1886, the Nadars, father and son, undertook a pioneering photo-interview with the hundred-year-old chemist Michel Chevreul.8 Nadar père had in fact proposed a “Daguerrotype accoustique” as early as 1856. Now his son Paul took a hundred photographs at 1/333 second, and claimed that he had wanted to record Chevreul’s answers to his father’s questions on a phonograph, but could not obtain one.9

Around this time, Henry Edmunds, a young English engineer who would later introduce Charles Rolls to Frederick Royce and so help create Rolls Royce, had become the English agent for the American Graphophone Company (AGC) and was busy promoting his new product. In late 1888, he filed a patent application for the use of the Graphophone to be attached to a telephone “to allow fleeting words to be recorded for future reference.”10 In a lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the same year he outlined what was by now the standard “business agenda”: “business men may carry on negotiations, recording each word spoken, preventing misunderstandings as to what was said … the stenographer may read his notes to it, leaving it to dictate to others to write them out.”11 And in another lecture at the Royal Society of Arts three months later, he expanded on this, as well as giving a plug for his new patent:

I have been much interested to note the enormous diversity of uses that have been suggested. Physicians ask for it in order that when returning home late at night they, without any fatigue, may simply speak into the machine as to the condition of the patient visited and suggest the necessary treatment. It also [is] suggested that residents in Bournemouth or Nice need not come to London to consult their medical men but can send samples of their cough by Graphophone, thus indicating the improvement or condition of their lungs. Blind people may also through the medium of their ears avail themselves of avenues of instruction and amusement to which their eyes have been so long closed. The small tradesman who cannot afford to have his own bookkeeper, and has not time during the press of business to put down the verbal orders he receives … can incidentally speak to this instrument … and leisurely take off the words thus spoken later in the day…. Connected to the telephone the other day, I was enabled to record the words spoken and to recall afterwards that which I had forgotten in the hurry of the moment, viz. whether I had made an appointment to meet a friend at London Bridge at six minutes past five or five past six.12

Alongside such uses, there is another less functional strand of hopes and plans that we might term memorialization—the desire to record for posterity famous voices—which is closely linked with fantasies about bringing the past to life. Marvin quotes the Washington correspondent of the Saint Louis Globe-Democrat, writing in 1888 (presumably linked with the AGC’s promotion of their new machine): “Suppose we could have graphophone communication with the year in which Plato lived and philosophized, and we could listen to his voice and hear his discourse.”13 This journalist continues with fantasies about recording Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra at the Pyramids, and ultimately the Garden of Eden—all of which tell us more about the cultural ambitions waiting to be met, but not by the gramophone. Meanwhile, a writer for the Electrical Review contemplated passing long summer evenings on the back stoop with recordings of “the lions in Daniel’s den, the sound of Nero’s fiddle and the clatter of the Roman Empire as she fell”—an agenda that moving pictures would go some way toward delivering fifteen years later.14

What was on offer to the early audiences for Phonograph and Graphophone demonstrations was a series of “audio autographs” of the still living or recently deceased. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, famously recorded for Edison’s agent, Colonel Gouraud, in 1890, as did William Gladstone and Robert Browning. In fact, Browning was probably the first to undergo the “posthumous revival” process so widely discussed in early accounts of both the phonograph and moving pictures. A gathering held in London on the first anniversary of his death heard the phonograph record of his reading—complete with him forgetting a line and having to be prompted.15

The capacity of the new electro-photo-mechanical media to capture and preserve a life-like image was a fantasy fast becoming a reality, within a culture that was also fast developing an enhanced awareness of sound-image correspondence. Consider just two of many possible examples taken from late-nineteenth-century painting. Millet’s L’Angélus of 1859 shows a peasant couple pausing in the fields as the Angelus bell sounds across the fields from the church spire seen in the distance behind the woman’s bowed back. Much has been said about the social and religious significance of this widely exhibited painting, which crisscrossed the Atlantic between 1872 and 1890, but it can scarcely be denied that the whole composition is focused by an implied sound, that of the church bell, without which it would be open to quite different interpretations.16

Another example is Ferdinand Knopff’s 1883 painting, En écoutant du Schumann, in which a woman is seated centrally, with her hand covering her face, as she listens intently to a piano only partly visible at the left of the picture. The specific reference to Schumann in the title is probably to indicate that this is serious, “deep” music (rather as Browning used to be considered so difficult that there were special societies that met and pondered his work). This seems to be a more developed instance of a painting that expects us to “hear” its sound in order to understand and empathize with its central image of intense listenership. By the mid-1880s, there is already an extensive culture of audio-visual representation in existence.

To trace the origins of this tradition of invention-cum-speculation it would be necessary to retrace the history of mechanized music making, including barrel organs, musical boxes, and various musical automata from the eighteenth century. This was still in full swing in 1870 when George Sand, the celebrated novelist and playwright, reported in a letter her visit to a M. Julien—“inventeur marchand, physicien chimiste, truciste”—who sold her a Ludion among other gadgets.17 This, she reported to a theater colleague, “is worthy of your theatre, it can play serious or gay music, solemn airs, dance music, sad songs and human voices.” It could play the overture for a serious play, she suggests, or stand in for a solo instrument: “the sounds are very beautiful, especially if the electric motor is dispensed with, since it stinks and makes a lot of noise.”

Here is an apparatus that, to an experienced Parisian playwright, seems to offer the promise of automating at least parts of the theater performance: the idea seems at least as attractive as the—no doubt precarious—reality. However, the most developed of all fictional elaborations of the new technology is Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s novel L’Eve future [The Future Eve], published in book form in 1886.18 This novel, notoriously, has a heavily mythologized Edison as one of its characters, a true modern magus as imagined by Villiers, far beyond even the self-promotion practiced by the Wizard of Menlo Park himself.19

Villiers’ novel appears to have had several sources. One was his fascination with the progress of science, which he watched with a mixture of awe and horror, and frequently mocked. This ambivalence is reflected in a number of his stories, notably the 1874 “L’Appareil pour l’analyse chimique du dernier soupir” [Apparatus for the Chemical Analysis of the Last Breath]—in which a device is developed for preserving dying breaths to facilitate mourning—and a sketch of 1877, Madame et son sosie [Madame and Her Double], about the creation of a perfect automaton, both of which predate the Edison phonograph’s first, sensational demonstration in Paris in March 1878.20 Another source of interest for Villiers was the unsuccessful research of his friend, Charles Cros, directed toward the same goal as Edison. Cros’s claims—or perhaps more precisely the claims of others on his behalf—that he in fact anticipated Edison are part of the partisan, chauvinistic chronicles of nineteenth-century invention.21 What seems clear is that Cros at least tried to develop a system to record sound, probably based on the phonoautograph, which proposed tracing an analogue pattern of sound onto smoked glass by means of a stylus.22 Cros may have experimented with this as early as 1860; at any rate he wrote some verses that express very well the romantic ambition of preserving the fleeting moment—a combination of the cult of the fragment and of intense emotion savored in recollection:23

J’ai voulu que les tons, la grâce, Tout ce que reflète une glace, L’ivresse d’un bal d’opéra, Les soirs de rubis, l’ombre verte Se fixent sur la plaque inerte. Je l’ai voulu, cela sera.

Comme les traits dans les camées J’ai voulu que les voies aimées

I wished that the sounds, the grace, All that a mirror would reflect, The intoxication of an opera ball, The ruby nights, the green shadow Would be fixed on an inert plate. I wished it, and it will be.

Like the features in a cameo I wanted lively gestures

Soient un bien, qu’on garde à jamais, Et puissent répéter le rêve Musical de l’heure trop brève; LE TEMPS VEUT FUIR, JE LE SOUMETS.24

To be a treasure, kept forever Able to repeat the dream Music of the fleeting hour. TIME SEEKS TO FLEE, AND I SUBDUE IT.

Cros also took an interest in color photography, apparently with as little practical success as his attempts at sound recording. But he may well have been the vital influence on Villiers’s L’Eve future.25 The theme of the novel, if not its text, is well known: Edison, the latter-day alchemist, offers to create a mechanical facsimile of his friend Lord Ewald’s beloved, the singer Alicia Clary, so that Ewald will not be driven to despair by her. The resulting andréide, Hadaly, succeeds only too well in capturing Ewald’s affections, with the aid of an elaborate phonographic apparatus that reproduces the real Alicia’s voice. But Hadaly is not in fact wholly mechanical, since she depends for animation on a supernatural being, Sowana, whose influence is transmitted through a medium.

For Villiers, science alone cannot achieve the perfection of nature without a vital spark of humanity, or indeed divinity. And in the end, Edison’s blasphemy—like that of Faust and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein—dooms him to damnation. Both Hadaly and her “original,” Alicia, die in a storm; but in his last message to Edison (in Morse code), Ewald confesses that it is Hadaly he grieves for. For what he loved was an idealized “Alicia,” symbolized by her singing voice; and this was what Edison had extracted and synthesized in Hadaly. Behind Villiers’ intended attack on scientism and materialism, and indeed his misogyny, there is a fetishization of the dis-embodied female image. Edison explains to Ewald how the android suppresses passion and desire in the most ardent male; elsewhere he refers to her as an “angel,” and angels are traditionally sexless.26

A similar theme appears in Jules Verne’s rather untypical novel Le château des Carpathes [The Castle in the Carpathians] in 1892. Untypical, because it is a tale of romantic rather than scientific passion, closer than most of Verne’s novels to the doom-laden atmosphere of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Rath Krespel, or indeed to L’Eve future, which some scholars believe directly influenced it.27 In Le château des Carpathes, an opera singer dies during her farewell performance, leaving her fiancé heartbroken. Many years later, the still grieving fiancé happens to be traveling near a ruined castle in the Carpathians—which he finds after a highly significant transaction in which a peddler sells a telescope to a Transylvanian shepherd, which allows the latter to discover that the castle presumed empty is in fact inhabited. In another of those numerous fin-de-siècle tropes that anticipate cinema, assisted or mechanized vision reveals signs of life, but it turns out to be life held in suspension. The fiancé enters the castle, only to hear and apparently see his beloved performing once again. But when he rushes toward her, the image shatters: it turns out to have been a reflection of a lifelike painted portrait, accompanied by one of the recordings that a fanatical admirer—the mad count who lives in the castle—had made by means of concealed phonographs on stage.

There is a recurrent motif in this era of Symbolism of the Circe-like female hypnotizing the helpless male; but in Verne and Villiers she is made immortal by means of the new technology of representation, and the enduring image is thus of her disembodied voice. It appears that the supposedly hardheaded inventors of the age were equally susceptible to such associations. Emile Berliner, the pioneer of the gramophone, gave a speech to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1890 in which he looked forward to the possibility of sound recordings cast in glass that would serve as dessert plates and then as after-dinner entertainment!28 What is telling here is the association between glass as a material and the spectral trace of the eminent dead, recordings of whom Berliner also thought might decorate the walls of future parlors and libraries.

The currency of such views, and their uncertain status between prediction and fantasy, may help to put in context the relatively familiar, but still curious, rhetoric that accompanied Edison’s own venture into synesthesia, or as Noël Burch termed it, “Edison’s lyrico-theatrical dream.”29 This was revealed publicly in the preface he contributed to the pamphlet written by William and Antonia Dickson in 1895 to promote his audiovisual inventions, which includes the following:

I believe that in coming years by the work of Dickson, Muybridge and Marey and others who will doubtless enter the field that grand opera can be given at the Metropolitan Opera House at New York without any material change from the original, and with artists and musicians long since dead.30

The strangely morbid fantasy, seemingly untypical of Edison, effectively adopts Verne’s scenario: the dead diva miraculously brought back to artificial life by means of recording. And it anticipates the similarly “resurrectionist” tone of the two famous press reports that appeared after the Lumières’ first public show in Paris later in the same year:

When apparatuses like this are available to the public, when everyone can photograph those who are dear to them, not only their posed forms but their movements, their actions, their familiar gestures, with words at the tip of their tongues, death will cease to be absolute. (La Poste, 30 December 1895)

We already can collect and reproduce words; now we can collect and reproduce life. We might even, for instance, see our friends or family as if living again long after they will have disappeared. (Le Radical, 30 December 1895)31

The culture within which moving pictures began was obsessed by death and its rituals, an obsession reflected in the vast literature and iconography of Symbolism, stretching from Poe and Baudelaire to Maeterlinck and Yeats, and also embracing such popular figures as Kipling and J. M. Barrie; in painting, it includes Böcklin, Knopff, Whistler, Klimt, and the Russian symbolist painters. A theme of growing importance in this culture was communication between the living and the dead, reflected in the widespread interest in psychic phenomena, an interest by no means confined to the conventionally religious or the sentimental—on the contrary, one very much the province of religious skeptics, scientists, and “seekers after the new.”

It was for these that photography had provided both a metaphor and a quasi-technology for exploring “beyond death”; and so the phonograph offered an equivalent metaphor-cum-technology for the spectral or the “phantasmal,” a term widely used by the scientific psychic researchers of the late nineteenth century in place of the vernacular “ghost” or “spirit.”32 Those gathered to hear Browning’s recorded voice after his death could hardly fail to compare this experience with that of a séance; while during his last illness the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Manning, actually recorded a phonographic message addressed to posterity.33 Was it because of these funerary associations that recorded speech and music seemed to many at the turn of the century intrinsically melancholy? In his discussion of the phonograph, Marshall McLuhan writes of the “undercurrent of mechanical music” being “strangely sad,” linking it with “the metaphysical melancholy latent in the great industrial world of the metropolis.”34 Music, or especially speech, without bodily presence; the moving likeness without sound (Gorky’s “kingdom of the Shadows”)—both of these spoke suggestively to a culture that was already accustomed to imagining life after death and to the denial of death’s finality in many of its most highly acclaimed imaginative works.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that interest in the metaphysics of the phonograph did not end with the arrival of moving pictures. In 1919, the late symbolist poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a curious text, “Ur-Geräusch” [The primal scream], in which he drew a comparison between the zigzag line of the skull’s coronal suture and the irregular groove of the phonograph. If the skull’s line could be transferred onto a disc and “played,” he speculated, might we not hear the “primal sound” and so get closer to the ultimate mystery of meaning and life?35 A few years later, André Gide would suggest that the phonograph will “soon clear out of the novel all its reported dialogue,” while the cinema will deal with exterior events and accidents, leaving the way clear for the roman pur.36 Notes

1. Edison’s words appear in his caveat to the US Patent Office, October 1888.

2. Luke McKernan, ed., A Yank in Britain: The Lost Memoirs of Charles Urban, Film Pioneer (Hastings: Projection Box, 1999), 30.

3. Many of the early moving picture companies surveyed in John Barnes, The Rise of the Cinema in England (London: Bishopsgate Press, 1983) also dealt in phonographs.

4. Charles Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lymann H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

5. Cyrano de Bergerac, L’Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1665).

6. Edison’s first success as an inventor was an improvement to the telegraph, followed by his development of the carbon microphone for the telephone, which led directly to the phonograph.

7. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 79.

8. The Nadars photo-interview with Chevreul was published in Le Journal illustré 5 September 1886—described in Helmut Gernsheim, History of Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 453.

9. Paul Nadar quoted in “Ignota, A Great Paris Photographer: M. Paul Nadar,” The Woman at Home, October 1898, 151–156—cited in Gernsheim.

10. Paul Tritton, The Lost Voice of Queen Victoria: The Search for the First Royal Recording (London: Academy Books, 1991), 43.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 45.

13.