The Dead Media Notebook (36 page)
Read The Dead Media Notebook Online
Authors: Bruce Sterling,Richard Kadrey,Tom Jennings,Tom Whitwell
His wax cylinder machines found their way into hundreds of thousands of homes, and entertained millions.
Less well known is Edison’s bungling attempts to follow up on the success of the cylinder phonograph. Although acoustically superior to Berliner’s disc-playing gramophone, the cylinder machines began losing ground to discs in 1901 and were almost moribund after the first world war. When Edison finally relented, he didn’t follow the rest of the pack.
The below are excerpted from The Fabulous Phonograph by Roland Gelatt:
“The great wartime phonograph boom came along just in time to accelerate the fortunes of Edison’s new Disc Phonograph. It had been officially unveiled in October 1913, when the cylinder was failing fast as a viable article of commerce; and it was pubicised with all the elan that Edison’s ingenious advertising department could muster.” [ All of the records you are likely familiar with, be they shellac 78, 45 singles or 33 /13 RPM vinyl LPs, have laterally cut grooves. Vertical cuts were a holdover from cylinders, but actually offered better sound, SEJ]
“The combination of vertical-cut recording, individually ground diamond styli, and Edison’s usual high standards of construction acted to make these instruments superior acoustically to any competing talking machine..”
“Highly paid singers were put under contract: Emmy Destinn, Frieda Hempel, [etc.]. But Edison was incapable of utilizing this talent to anyone’s satisfaction but his own. He was constantly interfering with the choice of repertoire and would stubbornly refuse to issue recordings that bore the approval of both his own recording directors and the artists themselves.” [Due to their popularity in Europe, and Edison’s own output, American phonograph manufacturers of the Teens produced machines with adaptors that allowed them to play both lateral and vertical cut discs. These faded away as the superior marketing and star-power of Columbia and other major labels overwhelmed the market.—SEJ]
“In 1925 electrical recording had delivered the final blow to Edison’s vertical-cut cylinders and discs. [Even when played back on an acoustic machine, electrically mastered discs captured a greater range of sound and allowed musicians to play naturally, rather than directing their efforts at a recording horn.—SEJ]
“At first the Edison publicists had tried to maintain that electrical recording figured in the mysterious Edison ‘secret process’ but despite the insinuations. the records continued to be recorded mechanically. To offset this drawback, the Edison company launched a long-playing record in 1926 that would give up to twenty minutes of uninterrupted entertainment per side.
“But no one at Thomas A. Edison, Inc. bothered to unfold the possibilities. Complete symphonies, entire operas were not found among the long-playing records issued. Instead there appeared a collection of dinner music played by the Hotel Commodore Ensemble and some operatic overtures played by Sodero’s Band and the American Symphony Orchestra. Not one Edison ‘Long Playing Record’ contained a piece of music lasting longer than the standard four minutes.”
[Edison introduced a few electrically recorded, standard lateral-cut records in the summer of 1929. Ten weeks later, on November 1
st
, the company announced that it was discontinuing product of both phonographs and records, including its “Blue Amberol” plastic cylinder recordings, which continued to sell steadily in a few parts of the South, decades after the rest of the country had relegated them to attics and junkheaps.]
[While Columbia and Berliner shellac records remain accessible to this day, thanks to the still-honored practice of putting a 78 rpm setting on turntables, Edison’s vertical cut disks are utterly unplayable without one of the specialized machines designed to accommodate them. They are truly dead media.]
Source: Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, J.B. Lippincott Company, New York. First Edition, 1955
From Richard Kadrey
Here is how to make flame sing: obtain a glass tube, one or two inches in diameter, open at both ends, and perhaps two or three feet long. Light a propane torch or similar burner, and insert the nozzle about one fourth of the way into the open lower end of the tube.
If conditions are right, you will hear the tone will begin, not abruptly, but with a growing volume. Gather together a tuned set of such tubes, develop the mechanisms to shut the flames on and off in a controlled manner, and you will have created a flame organ.
The sounds of such an arrangement, according to people who have worked with flame tones, are highly varied.
The system can be refined so as to dependably produce clear, steady tones at the frequency of the tube’s fundamental. Or the mechanism can be adjusted to bring out harmonics. On the other hand, you can take a less controlling approach, and let the system come forth with a menagerie of whoops, shrieks and moans.
One consistent characteristic: the attacks are not sharp; rather, each tone grows as the resonance establishes itself.
The earliest references to “burning harmonica” or “chemical harmonica” come to us from the late 1700s.
A century later the physicist Georges Fredric Eugene Kastner published Les flammes chantantes (Paris, 1875), a description of his fire organ, the pyrophone.
A photograph of this instrument appeared in Kenneth Peacock’s article on color organs in Experimental Musical Instruments, Volume VII #2, September 1991.
It appears as a moderately large console containing a small keyboard, with ten glass pipes rising from it. Later references to fire music generally take Kastner’s pyrophone as a starting point.
Of modern fire organs there are not many. One has been created by engineers at the Tokyo Gas Company. It is fully functional and played regularly in public. In the following pages you will read about three more, created by contemporary artists-in-fire.
From Paul Lindemeyer
May I submit for your approval the story of my own favorite dead medium, Television Screen News.
I’ve been digging into lost TV history for a while now, hoping to get a book or documentary out of it, and this device is one of the most interesting I’ve come across. Television Screen News, or Telelogoscopy, the ancestor of today’s video character generators, was another of the many mechanical television innovations of John Logie Baird.
Patented in 1927, the device used a disc scanner to televise a moving band of black letters, perhaps four at a time, on a white background.
At first individual 2-1/4” x 3” letter tiles were slotted into a roll of varnished linen, but by 1929, a more practical typewriter and rolls of paper tape replaced this arrangement.
Television Screen News served a need in the days when experimental television could not transmit audio and video at once, and visual definition was too low to allow intricate title cards to be used. It was used to identify stations, performers, and songs as well as its most obvious application, news bulletins.
“Stand by for Television Screen News,” spoken by an announcer interposed on the video frequency, was frequently heard during the Baird 30-line programs given through the BBC London transmitter from 1929-35. W2XAB of the Columbia Broadcasting System used a similar device for station identification in 1932-33.
The visual aspect of Television Screen News was said to be similar to the “zipper” or “motogram” revolving belt used to flash messages across the sides of buildings. It was a reliable test of picture quality for the home enthusiast and was thought in the early 1930s to have great possibilities for educating the deaf and other special applications.
However, along with mechanical television, Television Screen News became obsolete before it could see widespread use.
Source: H.J. Barton Chapple, How ‘Screen News’ Is Televised, Radio Review and Television News, Jan.-Feb. 1933 (pages 292-293); Benn Hall, Television: Talkies of the Air, The Billboard, February 25, 1933 (page 15).
From Stefan Jones
A History of the Phonograph, with Special Emphasis on Dead Phonograph Formats
Most of this material and all quotes come from THE FABULOUS PHONOGRAPH by Roland Gelatt, J.B. Lippincott, NY, 1955. Although the book ends when 78 rpm records were still in production, “Hi-Fi” was a suspicious fad, and Stereo was still over the horizon, Gelatt’s book is a great read and has great insights as to why recording formats, even technically superior ones, can become Dead Media. I would love to hear what Gelatt would have to say about the last fifteen years. A Note on Terminology: “Phonograph” is the proper name for Edison’s original tin- foil cylinder sound recorder and player, and for the much more practical wax-cylinder player-recorder he commercialized and sold until 1929. The lateral-groove-inscribed-disc playing machine we most often think of as a record player is more properly called a “gramophone,” after the original designed by Emile Berliner. The basic technology reigned virtually unchallenged, with relatively minor improvements, from 1901 to the 1980s. I will use “record player” to refer to all types of machines that play back sound recorded and reproduced via a vibrating needle.
The PHONOGRAPH was invented by Thomas Alva Edison in 1877. The first model used a vertically vibrating needle to inscribe a “hill and dale” pattern in a sheet of tin foil wrapped around a cardboard cylinder. Edison, ever the publicity hog, exhibited the machine to the staff of the Scientific American. A few hundred (?) of the temperamental machines were built and sold for use by traveling exhibitors. A fair number of the celebrities and potentates of the day had their voices recorded, but the tin foil recordings were not durable and no commercial recordings were ever offered.
The GRAPHOPHONE, a much improved phonograph that used wax-covered cardboard cylinders, was developed by Chichester A. Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter in 1881. After being rebuffed by Edison, whom they thought would be delighted with their work, they set up limited production in a plant in Washington D.C. Edison knocked-off the graphophone, and introduced his own improved phonograph. Bell and Tainter in turn stole an Edison innovation: solid wax cylinders. Both firms vied for leadership in a non-existent market for office sound recording devices. Just as lawsuits threatened to eliminate one or the other machine, investor J.H. Lippincott bought out both firms. He tried to lease the machines to businesses via a franchise system. To Edison’s chagrin, the biggest customers were drug stores, who turned the phonographs into crude jukeboxes. The D.C. area franchise, the Columbia Phonograph Company (!), began recording and selling wax cylinders containing music and recitations. Lippincott was struck with paralysis in 1890 and his virtually moribund empire was taken over by Edison. Edison still refused to cede that the phonograph’s killer app was music. The resurgent American Graphophone Company and Columbia threw off their shackles to go it on their own; they introduced reasonably priced home graphophones. Edison followed suit, introducing cheap home units and commercially recorded cylinders.
MEANWHILE, German emigre Emile Berliner toiled to perfect his GRAMOPHONE, which used a laterally vibrating needle to etch sound waves in disks of smoked glass. Photoengraving was used to etch the patterns in metal disks. He was awarded a patent in 1887. In 1889 Waltershausen, Germany toy maker Kammerer & Reinhardt licensed the design; they created a tiny toy record player with 5” celluloid or hard rubber disks. (Gelatt, page 64: “Most of the selections were in German, though a small number were recorded in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. The Lord’s Prayer and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star became the big sellers in England. Kammerer & Reinhardt manufactured gramophones for two or three years, then dropped them in favor of more lucrative products.”)
Berliner introduced his first “serious” gramophone in America in 1893. The hand-turned turntable and heavy rubber discs did not sound anywhere as good as the cylinders, but the machines were cheap and the discs could be mass produced; the metal engraving produced by photoengraving could be used to stamp out records. By 1893, both Edison’s phonograph and the Graphophone were selling briskly.
Hand-cranked models sold for as little as $10. Dozens of small record companies emerged to fill the need for software. The cylinders all had to be recorded from live music; hired bands played the same selection over and over in front of a bank of recording machines. Columbia became the master of marketing cylinders, and its catalog listed hundreds of titles. Most recordings of the time were folk music (“coon shouters” to use Edison’s term) and popular ballads.
Italian Gianni Bettini sought to uplift the audience with better fare and created the MICRO-PHONOGRAPH, a derivative but much improved wax cylinder machine.
The crystal diaphragm that vibrated the needle was replaced with mica, and the needle itself was mounted on a “spider” that transmitted the force of the vibration more efficiently. The results were critically acclaimed, both for content and technique. Famous instrumentalists and stars from the Metropolitan Opera who shunned contact with the phonograph industry gratefully performed for Bettini’s machine. His toney cylinders sold for anywhere from $2.00 to $6.00, versus $.50 for a typical Columbia release. Bettini closed up shop in 1902, sold his patents to Edison, and moved to France, where he produced machines and recordings for several more years, although never in great number. He left the record player industry for good in 1908. Bettini’s collection of original recordings was destroyed in WWII.
Columbia, which marketed a line of graphophones, introduced the GRAPHOPHONE GRAND in 1898s. It used a cylinder 4.5” in diameter instead of the usual 2”. The bulky machine, which sold for $150, was touted as playing at many times the usual volume.
Edison followed suit with the EDISON CONCERT GRAND PHONOGRAPH. Gelatt: “But despite extensive advertising by both companies, the large- cylinder machines did not find a secure footing in the American market. After a few years they disappeared entirely.” (Gelatt briefly notes that Pathe (q.v.) marketed a “larger and louder” “Salon” cylinder in France just after the turn of the century; perhaps this was a derivative of the 4.5” cylinders?)