Where Have All the Good Times Gone? E-Book

Louis Barfe

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 900

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Louis Barfe's elegantly written, authoritative and highly entertaining history charts the meteoric rise and slow decline of the popular recording industry. Barfe shows how the 1920s and 1930s saw the departure of Edison from the phonograph business he created and the birth of EMI and CBS. In the years after the war, these companies, and the buccaneers, hucksters, impresarios and con-men who ran them, reaped stupendous commercial benefits with the arrival of Elvis Presley, who changed popular music (and sales of popular music) overnight. After Presley came the Beatles, when the recording industry became global and record sales reached all time highs. Where Have All The Good Times Gone? also charts the decline from that high-point a generation ago. The 1990s ushered in a period of profound crisis and uncertainty in the industry, encapsulated in one word: Napster. Barfe shows how the almost infinite amounts of free music available online have traumatic and disastrous consequences for an industry that has become cautious and undynamic.

Leseprobe

WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE?

Louis Barfe war born in 1973 in Epsom, Surrey. He studied at Lancaster University and, perhaps more fruitfully, ’Ear ’Ere Records, the local independent record shop. He has written for a wide variety of publications including Private Eye, Publishing News, New Statesman and Crescendo and Jazz Music, the earnings from which he has spent largely on records. He lives in Suffolk, near a branch of Andy’s.

From the reviews:

‘An extensive history of the record industry. . . Barfe’s comprehensive research is peppered with entertaining anecdotes, while his approach combines a weighty respect for his subject with a healthy dose of cynicism.’ Metro

‘A riveting book . . . An exhilarating read that conjures up the world of those who make recordings, and the commercial realities and pitfalls facing those who produce them with infectious zeal . . . A fascinating exposé on the recording industry in general and the meteoric rise and slow decline of popular music.’ Julian Haycock, Classic FM magazine Best Buy

‘Where Have All the Good Times Gone? is an elegant, readable history of recorded sounds from Edison onwards, alive with fascinating details . . . Barfe’s fine book covers the imminent fall as well as the glorious rise of the music biz with a rueful shake of the head . . . Magisterial.’ Stuart Maconie, Oldie

First published in hardback Great Britain in 2004 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

This paperback edition published by Atlantic Books in 2005.

Copyright © Louis Barfe 2004, 2005

The moral right of Louis Barfe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 84354 067 3 eISBN 978 1 78239 219 4

Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham

Atlantic Books An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

For my late grandmother, Jean Murray, who encouraged me; my late headmistress, Anne Hanlon, who encouraged me to write; and the late Brian Masters, who encouraged me to write this book.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 Buying – and selling – the Edison myth

2 Tvinkle, tvinkle, little star

3 The Jones boy

4 Continental shift

5 The Coldstream Guards and all that jazz

6 Brother, can you spare 75c for a gramophone record?

7 Don’t you know there’s a war on?

8 Picking up the pieces

9 Pop goes the weasel

10 Paris, Liverpool and British West Hampstead

11 The spirit of independence

12 You can spread jam on them

13 Caught Napstering

AFTERWORD

NOTES

FURTHER READING

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Thomas Alva Edison

2 Diagram of the phonograph, Illustrated London News, 1878

3 Advertisement for the phonograph, c.1900

4 ‘The Song of Mister Phonograph’

5 The Gramophone Company’s first studio in Maiden Lane, London, c.1898

6 Fred Gaisberg

7 Emile Berliner and Charles Sumner Tainter

8 Edison ‘Gold Moulded’ wax cylinder

9 Edison ‘Diamond Disc’

10 Edison-Bell advertisement

11 Jack Hylton and his band

12 Edward Elgar opens studio 1 at Abbey Road

13 Ted Heath record sleeve

14 Mike Ross-Trevor in the control room of Levy’s Sound Studios, London, 1964

15 Advertisement for the Decca portable gramophone, 1924

16 Sir Edward Lewis

17 Decca calls a halt to its war of advertising with EMI, 1953

18Arthur Godfrey’s TV Calendar Show, 1953

19 Goddard Lieberson, Jerry Herman and Clive Davis with Angela Lansbury, 1967

20 Ray Horricks, Arthur Lilley, Johnny Keating, Reg Guest and Tony d’Amato, 1964

21 HMV and Columbia advertisements, 1928

22 HMV French record sleeve, c.1935

23 The Minneapolis Journal’s interpretation of the HMV logo, 1908

24 Bruce Lundvall

25 Doug Morris

26 Sir Joseph Lockwood with the Beatles

27 1984 trade ad for Dire Straits on CD

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce images: 1, Getty Images; 2, Bill Kibby-Johnson collection; 5, 6, 12, 26 EMI Records Ltd; 7, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; 14, Mike Ross-Trevor; 16, Decca Music Group Ltd; 19, Bettmann / Corbis; 20, Michael Ward; 23, Martin Fenton collection; 24, Blue Note Records; 27, Universal Music. All other images are from the author’s own collection.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the following, without whom this book would have been a lot shorter.

• Toby Mundy at Atlantic Books for suggesting that there might be a book in my anorakdom, for ongoing encouragement and advice and for his liberal interpretation of the word ‘deadline’. Not to mention his colleagues Clara Farmer, Bonnie Chiang and Louisa Joyner for helping shape the whole thing into the form you see here. Thanks also to my copy-editor Rachel Leyshon for telling me when I was turning into Roger Irrelevant.

• Mike Ross-Trevor and the late Brian Masters for motivating me by both saying ‘Well, I’d read it’.

• Ruth Edge and Greg Burge, both formerly of the EMI archive at Hayes in Middlesex, without whom the early part of the book would have been very sketchy and their colleague, Chris Jones; John Warren at the Edison National Historic Monument in West Orange, New Jersey, for his time, enthusiasm and letting me make a tinfoil recording; Vince Giordano (ace tuba player) and Mike Panico at the RCA/BMG archive in New York; and to Maureen Fortey, who quite frankly is the Decca Record Company archive, for her help. Also, the staff who helped me at the British Library – both at St Pancras and Colindale – as well as their counterparts at the London Library and my local library in Lowestoft.

• The interviewees who, between January 2002 and May 2003, took the time to speak to me. In doing so, they made the story come alive: George Avakian, Jay Berman, Ed Bicknell, Rodney Burbeck (some of the interviewees were easier to locate than others. Rodney was my editor when I worked at Publishing News), Richard Elen, Ahmet Ertegun, Derek Everett, David Fine, Tony Hall, Ray Horricks, Alan Kayes, Charles Kennedy, Eddie Levy, Jimmy Lock, Bruce Lundvall, Hugh Mendl, Angela Morley, Mike Ross-Trevor, Tim Satchell, Adele Siegal, Mike Smith, Coen Solleveld, Clive Stanhope, Seymour Stein, Roger Watson, Diana Weller, Muff Winwood and Walter Woyda. Gratitude also to Tina Taylor for help with transcription as the deadline loomed. There are others who gave me more general pointers and contacts, including Elisabeth Iles and Adrian Strain at the IFPI, Stan Cornyn, Adam White, Irv Lichtman, Norman Lebrecht, Earl Okin, Arthur Zimmermann, Tim Blackmore, Demitri Coryton, Mike Richter, David Sarsner, Brian Southall, Stanley and Edna Black and others who wish to remain anonymous.

• The friends who helped immensely: Mike Brown, Martin Fenton, Nigel Hunter, Gavin Sutherland and John Warburton for reading the manuscript with expert eyes; Bill Kibby-Johnson for historical documents and illustrations; Richard Abram, Bob Flag, Kif Bowden-Smith and Patrick Humphries for clarifying certain details; Bob Baker, Tom Bircher, Mike Hamilton, Anne Hanlon, Beryl Jackson, Howard Turner, Steve Turner, Joost van Loon and Trevor Wallis for laying the foundations, perhaps unwittingly; Nixon Bardsley, Ralph Baxter, Adam Cumiskey, Allen Eyles, Stuart Farnden, Alex George, Geoff Hiscott, Sally Kennedy, Matt Levy, Richard Lewis, Hilary Lowinger, Andrew Malcolm, Steve Mann, James Masterton, Charlie Mounter, Nick Parker, Sue Roccelli, Kerry Swash, Roger Tagholm, Ben Tisdall, David Trevor-Jones, Francis Wheen and Alan Wood for general encouragement; and my childhood partner-in-crime, Stephen Gilchrist, who typed up the Tony Hall interview in exchange for my help with installing a bathroom sink. Who said barter was dead?

• The family: My mother, Maureen Barfe, not only for the obvious biological reasons, but also because she started the whole thing off when I was five, by giving me her Dansette and a bunch of 45s; my grandparents, Bob and Jean Murray, for making me listen to certain things, giving me a vast number of records and the funds to acquire yet more; and finally to my wife, Susannah, who puts up with me, and our own Nipper lookalike dog, Lyttelton, who puts up with us both. Naturally, any errors are my own stupid fault.

Lowestoft and London

November 2003 and October 2004

INTRODUCTION

Hunter S. Thompson once described the television industry as a ‘cruel and shallow money trench. . .a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason’. Over the years, Thompson’s words have often been adapted and applied to the music industry, for a very good reason. Yet it is a branch of commerce that touches all of our lives, quite often for the better.

Even Warner Bros, for example, which had a reputation in the 1970s for musical enlightenment and attracted artists of the calibre of Paul Simon, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Tower of Power and Little Feat, issued one-sided contracts just like everyone else. After the payment of the initial advance, the act received a percentage so small that they would be in debt to the record company long after it had recouped its investment. The record company also had the absolute right to reject the recordings that their contracted artists had made. If the budget had been spent on the original recordings, the artist had to pay for the remakes. Somehow, though, the glorious end seemed to justify the means. Listen to Lowell George’s Thanks I’ll Eat It Here from beginning to end. Warners, despite the unfair business methods that were the industry standard, were doing something right.

In recent years, however, the industry has gone into freefall. Global music sales fell by 7 per cent in value and by 8 per cent in units in 2002. The pattern had, until the end of the 1990s, been one of growth, but it suddenly slipped into reverse. A business model that had endured untroubled for over a century is now taking a kicking. Some have argued that the problem started when the ‘suits’ took over – that the music business became everything to do with business and precious little to do with music. It’s a romantic idea, but it’s a myth. The record business has always been about making money, and from its outset, a few companies have been remarkably successful in doing it and making sure that no one else did without their approval.

That ‘no one’ includes the artists and producers. Until the 1960s, producers were invariably record company staffers, receiving modest salaries for keeping their bosses in profit. The artists were merely hired hands, with all but the biggest paid on a per session basis. As producers went freelance and artists got better management, royalties for both became the norm, but still the lion’s share of the proceeds from any record sale went to the record company.

Now, with the effects of file-sharing, MP3 and CD-R combining with the old problem of industrial-scale piracy allied to organized crime, the business seems to be getting its comeuppance. The old certainties have disappeared from markets all around the world. Record companies can no longer relieve music fans of their cash with the ease that they once did. If you want a particular song and you have an Internet connection, chances are that you can download it from someone, somewhere on the worldwide web. The record company doesn’t get paid and neither does the artist.

However, for established artists, there is a silver lining to this particular cloud. They can now abandon their corporate paymasters and start selling direct to their punters, primarily over the Internet. Sales are inevitably lower, but the proportion of cash going straight to the talent is much, much higher. Piracy is all too often presented as a new problem when, in fact, the origins of the current meltdown have been intrinsic to the industry from its start 125 years ago. Piracy has been present from the very beginning.

There have been rises and falls before. From the inception of the industry, in the late nineteenth century, to the outbreak of the First World War, the pattern was one of unchecked growth. The shock of the war grievously depressed sales, but the market recovered. Then came radio, which played the latest records and affected sales in the US (British radio meant the BBC and that august institution shied away from filling its airtime with vulgar, commercial records). Just as the record companies were beginning to reach an accommodation with the broadcasters, the world was affected by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

Each time there was a fresh slump, a new development came along that could be brought into play to save the industry. The worst effects of radio were tempered by the advent of electric recording, a vast improvement on the old acoustic system. The massive decline in the industry following the Great Depression was reversed gradually by the application of price reductions. Later on, technical marvels like vinyl microgroove, stereo and, finally, compact disc represented a chance for the industry to revive sales, quite often selling people what they already had in a new, improved format.

Crucially, each of these developments had been created by big business or the record companies themselves. Electric recording was the creation of Western Electric, which made money from its invention by charging record companies that used it a sizeable royalty. The vinyl 33⅓ rpm disc was the creation of the US major Columbia Records, while the 45 was developed by the rival Victor concern. Stereo was a rare case of collaboration and consultation between the majors to avoid conflicting standards. Compact disc was jointly developed by Philips, which controlled the vast PolyGram record combine, and Sony, which owned a Japanese joint venture with Columbia and was shortly to buy the US company.

Now, however, the emergent format is MP3. The record industry did not create the MP3 format and so has no control over it. The free and easy, anarchic nature of non-corporate software developers means that they have no interest in restricting the use of the file-sharing systems that they invent and little interest in licensing the goods to turn a coin. The means of production and replication, for so long the province of big business, have been given to all. Those who stand to lose big call it ‘theft’. Informed consumers call it ‘democratization’. Less informed consumers look at it as an all-you-can-eat restaurant with no cover charge.

For most of the last century, making a record has been an activity dreamed about by many but only ever enjoyed by a select few. The dominance of a few major companies made sure of that. The closest most people ever got to immortalizing themselves on disc were the ‘record your own voice’ booths, which used to be found at railway stations or at tiny ‘studios’ in seaside resorts. The example everybody remembers is the machine that Pinkie uses to inform Rose of the harsh truth of their relationship in Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. One summer in the mid-1950s while on a day trip to Southend-on-Sea, two such ordinary people were my grandmother and her youngest brother. Taking advantage of the rudimentary studio facilities at the pierhead, they recorded the 1918 Leo Wood composition ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’. It must have been around 1955, because Uncle Terry comes over like a South London version of Johnnie Ray, and that was when Ray’s hit version was released. Instead of the Nabob of Sob’s backing band, however, Uncle Terry was accompanied by Nan, tickling the ivories of a particularly battered upright piano. This disc acquired a unique position in family mythology, long after all means in our possession of playing it at the right speed (78 rpm, naturally) had spun their last.

The advent of portable tape recorders went some way towards redressing the balance. My mother introduced me to the delights of the reel-to-reel tape deck with an off-air recording that she had made in September 1965 of Kenny Everett on the pirate station Radio London. However, there has always been an extra bit of magic about a proper record – be it vinyl, shellac, acetate or even compact disc. Now, for only a few hundred pounds, we can buy digital multi-track recorders with sound quality that equals professional machinery and computers that will allow us to transfer the results onto compact disc. It’s even possible to buy software that allows the DIY remastering expert to reduce the noise. I did exactly this when I was able to present my grandmother and my great-uncle with a CD of their seaside jollity nearly fifty years later.

The anti-globalization protests of recent years might lead one to conclude that consolidation and the creation of conglomerates are recent phenomena. While the pace has certainly increased in recent years, through various mergers and takeovers, the record industry has always been dominated by a few global players. At the start, Edison had a monopoly with his tinfoil cylinder phonograph. When Alexander Graham Bell, his brother Chichester and the English scientist Charles Sumner Tainter improved on Edison’s work, a duopoly was created, which briefly became a monopoly again when the two sets of interests joined in a business alliance. Then, when Emile Berliner came to the fore with his disc-based gramophone, a third axis was added.

All of this business activity occurred before 1888, and yet the descendants of two of these groups are still very active. Only Edison, who dropped out of the record game at the time of the Depression, is unrepresented. The corporate history of Columbia, now owned by the monolithic Japanese electronics company Sony, can be traced back directly to the formation, by Tainter and the Bells, of the Volta Graphophone Company in 1886. Meanwhile, the German-owned Bertelsmann Music Group, through its stewardship of the RCA Victor label, is merely carrying on the business that Emile Berliner started in 1888. The UK’s EMI group has the distinction of being descended from both lines. It was created in 1931 by the merger of the Gramophone Company – which had been started as Berliner’s UK arm – and the British division of the Columbia Graphophone Company.

The fourth major, Universal – now the largest music company in the world – controls the former MCA and PolyGram businesses. MCA was founded in the 1920s, although it didn’t enter the record industry until the early 1960s, when it acquired the American Decca company. PolyGram, although dating as an entity only from 1962, encompassed the record business of the Dutch electrical firm Philips, the German label Deutsche Grammophon/Polydor and the British company Decca, all of which also have long histories. Warner Bros, the fifth major and until recently part of the AOL Time-Warner group, is a relative latecomer, the group’s record business having started from scratch in the late 1950s, and having added significantly to its reach by the absorption of Elektra and Atlantic in the 1960s to form WEA.

For all of the changes of ownership, the record industry has displayed a staggering degree of continuity over the last 125 years or so, unmatched in almost any other business. In the earliest days, new entrants were kept out of the business by these groups’ domination of the various patents pertaining to the mechanical reproduction of music. The mere threat of a lawsuit was usually enough to deter all but the most determined entrepreneur. By the time these patents expired, the Berliner and Bell axes were so entrenched that new companies trying to gain a share of the market had to play by the rules of the established companies or not at all.

Moreover, these concerns – now thought to be bitter, pitched rivals – have, at various times, owned large chunks of each other. Bell begat Columbia. Berliner begat the Gramophone Company, which in turn gave birth to Deutsche Grammophon. Along with Victor, which took over the Berliner business in the US, the Berliner-originated companies had the rights to Francis Barraud’s famous painting of his dog Nipper, a canvas better known as His Master’s Voice. This was all very well when the companies were affiliated, but when the Victor–Gramophone alliance foundered in the 1950s, each side retained Nipper for their home territories. The divide persists to this day, and with global brand image having become seemingly more important than ever, the restrictions mean that one of the most famous trademarks in the world is now largely unused by its owners. In the US, even HMV record stores bear no trace of Barraud’s attentive dog.

Thus entrenched, these conglomerates took it upon themselves to record music all around the world. Between 1898 and the start of the Great War, ad hoc tours by ‘recording experts’ (as sound engineers were then known) and, later, the establishment of permanent subsidiaries in South America, Africa, India, Russia, Asia and Australasia created a repertoire of locally recorded material. Creative considerations were very much secondary: the primary purpose of these tours was to sell gramophones to the natives. Indeed, the whole business model was fundamentally exploitative. As well as selling machines to people who frequently could barely afford them, the companies paid the artists a flat fee. However, the process was paying an artistic dividend, producing a catalogue of recordings that now has vast historical importance. The voice of the last surviving castrato singer, recorded in Rome, was preserved just in time. Japanese folk music was captured in all of its clangour. The Swedish singer Jenny Lind, one of the great stars of the Victorian era, had died before the gramophone took hold, but Enrico Caruso left the world with more than just a second-hand reputation.

This global reach has created a paradox. While the domination of large Anglo-American interests has homogenized the music produced in some fields – all too often, chart pop from Boston or Bangkok can be differentiated only by the language used by the singer – the establishment of semi-autonomous subsidiaries all around the world has helped make international successes of artists and genres who might otherwise have remained local phenomena. Caruso was poached by the Metropolitan Opera in New York on the strength of the early records he made in Milan. The worldwide rise in popularity of the tango in the 1920s can be ascribed directly to the presence in South America of European-owned record companies such as Odeon, a subsidiary of the German Lindström group, who recorded the indigenous music and had the international sales networks needed to take it to a wider public.

Almost every world crisis over the last 100 years has affected the music business. The First World War nearly put the Gramophone Company out of business, as it was hit by the sudden slump in leisure spending and, perhaps more critically, being cut off from its continental subsidiaries. Deutsche Grammophon had been HMV’s German subsidiary, but from 1914, it traded in its own right, retaining the Nipper trademark until the Second World War. The Gramophone Company was saved only by turning much of its Hayes, Middlesex, plant over to munitions work for the British war effort and the vigorous promotion of patriotic records as morale-boosters.

The Depression resulted in an extensive consolidation of the industry – most notably the merger of HMV and UK Columbia to form EMI – at about the same time that record sales were being decimated by the growing popularity of radio. Stereo, being developed at this time by Alan Blumlein of EMI and, independently, by Bell Laboratories in the US, was abandoned as a bridge too far. In a global slump, who would be interested in buying a new record player? Victor’s early attempt at a long-playing record went much the same way.

The history of recording, from the 1880s onward, has been one of tensions between the businessmen who backed the schemes, the scientists who developed the various advances in recording and playback technology and the artists who created the music. It is easy to slip into thinking of inventors as other-worldly professors, developing ideas for the common good and being recklessly generous with their patents. In the early days of the music industry, however, the inventors were often highly entrepreneurial. Just as the automatic telephone exchange was invented not by an electrical whiz but by an undertaker called Strowger who was tired of telephone operators directing clients to his rivals, the gramophone was developed to generate cash. Thomas Edison – credited with the invention of the cylinder record – retained a strong proprietorial interest in seeing his products earn their keep. Emile Berliner – the progenitor of the flat disc record – was no less business-minded. Meanwhile, Berliner’s associate Eldridge R. Johnson was effectively three people in one: a trained mechanical engineer, a businessman and an impresario. The first role saw him pioneering the use of flat discs instead of cylinders and refining the spring-driven motor that powered most gramophones in the pre-electric days. His second self realized the importance of advertising to the record business and negotiated the deal to supply Berliner with the motor. The third Eldridge R. Johnson personally oversaw the building of Victor’s roster of artists, which included Caruso. From the start, the record business has been a nexus where commerce has met creativity, where the monetary and the military have joined forces with the musical.

The gramophone turned music into an industry. Previously the only way that music could be enjoyed at home was if one or more members of a household could play an instrument. If the listener’s tastes were extremely limited, there were always the tinklings of a music box. Although sales of sheet music acted as a precursor for what became the record market, the interpretation of each piece was very much down to the individual player. Over the century since the gramophone took precedence, the role of the music publishers has changed. As sheet music sales have declined, their purpose has been to administer and collect songwriters’ royalties, as opposed to the performer royalties dealt with by the record companies. Music publishers have also, in many cases, started to play more of a part in developing artists before they sign to a record company. The Beatles joined Parlophone and then found a music publisher, Dick James. In contrast, a modern band writing its own songs might well sign with a music publisher, which pays for the demo recordings that land the group their recording contract. Very often, the publisher will be wholly or part-owned by the record company in question.

The dominance of big business in music has now been challenged, possibly with fatal consequences. This book is an attempt to explain how the global record industry reached its current predicament, and to suggest where, if anywhere, it can go from here. It is also a book about the people who made the industry, with all of its flaws, rather than the artists who made the music. Along the way, these have included more than a few heroes, villains, eccentrics, egocentrics, misers, spendthrifts, thieves and saints. It is fitting that almost all of those appellations can be applied to the first man associated with the industry – Thomas Alva Edison.

1 Buying – and selling – the Edison myth

When history is viewed in Gradgrindian terms as a succession of facts to be learned by rote, it is usually enough to say that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Of course, the truth of the phonograph’s provenance is less simple. Edison once declared, famously, ‘Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.’ Many before him had given the matter of recorded sound a great deal of very serious thought, followed by a considerable amount of sweat. Unfortunately for them, none had managed to produce a working device that retained sound waves for later playback until Edison produced his first tinfoil cylinder machine in late 1877. Perhaps more importantly, none understood the importance of publicity as well as Edison did.

Some perspired more than others. One of Edison’s precursors who got closest was the Frenchman Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, who, in 1857, had produced the phonautograph. His invention involved a horn, a stylus – in this case made of bristle – attached to a diaphragm, and a cylinder faced with lampblack-coated paper.1 This arrangement allowed sound waves to be represented visually. Unfortunately, there was no means of replaying whatever had been etched into the lampblack, so the phonautograph was of limited use. Scott was, however, definitely barking up the right tree.

As was another Frenchman, Charles Cros, a poet, amateur scientist, artist, musician, prodigious absinthe drinker (an enthusiasm that would kill him in 1888 at the age of just forty-six) and friend of the painter Edouard Manet. This appealingly Bohemian polymath deposited a sealed paper at the Academie des Sciences in Paris on 30 April 1877 in which he described, theoretically, a process for recording and reproducing sound. He wrote of ‘obtaining traces of the movements to and fro of a vibrating membrane and in using this tracing to reproduce the same vibrations with their intrinsic relations of duration and intensity, either by means of the same membrane or some other one equally adapted to produce the sounds which result from this series of movements’.2

The means for achieving this were, he said, ‘a delicate stylus’ tracing the sound waves on a disc of lampblacked glass. These were then to be transformed, by photoengraving, into indentations ‘capable of guiding a moving body, which transmits these movements to the sound membrane’. The whole assembly was to be known as the pareographe. The Cros paper, explaining what it called a ‘process of recording and of reproducing audible phenomena’, was read out in open session in December 1877. Cros had taken the academic route because he could not afford to apply for a patent, nor could he find any backers willing to meet the cost. He also lacked the resources to turn his theoretical machine into reality, but he had taken theory a step further forward, and an important one at that. He was the first to mention the groove.

Cros, born in 1842, was an almost exact contemporary of Edison’s. His theory was lodged with the Academie three months before Edison’s first known forays into phonographic development, but not published until the American had already applied for a patent. As a result of this (and of French national pride), Cros is held by his compatriots to be the true inventor of the phonograph, despite having never produced a working model. In the first decent history of the medium to be published, Roland Gelatt formulated a neat compromise: ‘Let it be resolved by giving each his due: Charles Cros for being the first to conceive the phonograph, Thomas Edison for being the first to achieve it.’3

During his long life, Edison registered 1,093 United States patents.4 The first was in June 1869, when he was twenty-two. His last application was made in 1931, the year of his death, when he was working, with limited success, on alternatives to latex that could be grown in the US.

His first phonographic patent – US patent number 200,521 – was applied for in the US on 24 December 1877 and granted on 19 February 1878. Although he was, at this point, only just thirty years old, his achievements and his talent for mythology and self-publicity meant that he was already well on the way to becoming an American folk hero.

Thomas Edison was born on 11 February 1847 in Milan, Ohio. His father had been, at various times of his life, a carpenter, a property speculator and a gentleman farmer, while his mother was a schoolteacher. However, by 1854, the family had moved to Port Huron, Michigan, a lumber town near the Canadian border with a large railroad depot. Much of Edison’s education was undertaken at home, which some sources attribute to his weak childhood constitution, while others suggest that it was in order to economize.

He began work at the age of fourteen, selling newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railroad. For most of the details of Edison’s early life, we are reliant upon Edison’s own version of events. This is problematic, as the inventor was not averse to changing his stories to suit different audiences. According to a set of autobiographical notes that Edison prepared in 1908–9, he claimed to have capitalized on the Civil War battle of Shiloh in 1862 by negotiating credit to buy more newspapers than usual. As he recognized a mounting demand for the news with each station along the line, he upped the price of his stock incrementally. A good story and one pointing to Edison’s obvious business acumen, but was it entirely true? In the absence of any other contemporary reports, there is no way of corroborating it or dismissing it, but it is perhaps worthwhile to be a little cynical. Rather better established is the fact that he produced his own news sheet for travellers, called the Weekly Herald, using a baggage car as his editorial office and printing works.

At the age of fifteen, Edison began to study telegraphy, and found himself working at various railroad telegraph offices, before eventually taking up a position with the Western Union Telegraph Company. He soon gained a reputation for great speed and accuracy. When he moved to the Boston office in 1868, the incumbents, in order to initiate the new boy, presented him with an impossibly complex 1,500-word special cable from the fastest operator around, a man called Hutchinson.

To everybody’s astonishment, Edison sailed through, but he later admitted it was a little daunting. ‘After about three-quarters of the special, Hutchinson got nervous and commenced to abbreviate,’ Edison remembered. ‘As I had to write out in full I knew that soon I would have to break, so to save the day before this took place, I opened the key and said, “You seem to be tired, suppose you send a little with your other foot.” This saved me . . . After this I was all right with the other operators.’5

His popularity was also not harmed by his invention of a device to electrocute the cockroaches that infested the office. However, at this time, he was also working his first serious patents, the telegraphic printer and the electric vote counter. Shortly after achieving these, he moved to Newark, New Jersey, and set up in business on his own. Although the vote recorder failed commercially, his telegraphic printer found favour with financial institutions as a ‘stock ticker’. His next major breakthrough came in 1873 with his quadruplex telegraph, which could handle four messages at once, two in each direction. The invention was bought for $30,000 by Jay Gould of Western Union’s great rival, the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company. Western Union immediately put Edison on a retainer to make sure that it had first dibs on any future inspirations and perspirations.

By 1874, Edison had begun inventing on an industrial scale, with a staff of 120. However, when he established his laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, he took only the twenty most able and trusted of these assistants with him. These were the men that he called his ‘muckers’, styling himself as the ‘chief mucker’. The first project to detain the Menlo Park muckers was the improvement of Alexander Graham Bell’s newly unveiled telephone. Working very carefully around the Bell patents, Edison tried to grab a piece of the action, and succeeded with his carbon button transmitter (microphone), which proved to be a vast advance on Bell’s own creation.

Having harnessed sound vibrations, Edison wondered whether a point attached to a diaphragm making indentations in a suitable material would capture the sounds for replay. This thought is reputed to have occurred to him after the sharp point on the underside of a moving telephone diaphragm pricked his finger. His phonographic experiments began in the autumn of 1877, although the exact date is uncertain. The job of assembling the prototype phonograph was given to one of the most trusted muckers, machinist John Kruesi. There is, in the archive at the Edison National Historical Site in West Orange, New Jersey, a sketch made by Edison, under which he has written: ‘Kreusi [sic], Make This, Edison, Aug 12/77.’ However, writing in 1906, another mucker, Charles Batchelor, gave the date of the breakthrough as November 1877. The official version at West Orange nowadays, based on analysis of Edison’s writing, is that the inscription on the drawing (which is, in any case, far too vague to have been of any use to Kruesi) and possibly the drawing itself, date from much later, maybe even the 1920s. To confuse matters further, the collection of Edison papers at Rutgers University contains a drawing, also dated 12 August 1877, showing the phonograph as a device that uses reels of paper tape to capture Morse code signals. It is understood that this was the invention which first alerted Edison to the possibilities of sound retention.

Kruesi had made a machined metal cylinder, with a spiral guide groove, around which a sheet of thick tinfoil was wrapped. Thus equipped, Edison shouted, ‘Mary had a little lamb’ into the mouthpiece attached to the diaphragm and stylus. He then took the stylus back to the start and listened for whatever had been indented in the foil. Batchelor recalled: ‘We got, “ary ad ell am,” [...] but the shape of it was there and so like the talking that we all let out a yell of satisfaction and a “Golly it’s there!” and shook hands all round.’6

The contraption needed a name. Among those considered were the polyphone, the autophone and the acoustophone, before Edison settled on phonograph, a name which seems also to have been used to describe Cros’s creation by the Abbé Lenoir in the 10 October 1877 issue of La Semaine du Clerge. Edison then took the phonograph to the offices of the Scientific American. The journal reported in its 22 December 1877 issue that:

Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night. These remarks were not only perfectly audible to ourselves, but to a dozen or more persons gathered around.7

Two days after the cover date of the journal, Edison applied for a US patent.

Given the sealed nature of Cros’s submission to the Academie, it is unlikely that Edison was aware of French developments. Their parity appears, therefore, to be purely coincidental. Some have argued that Cros, had he the proper resources and finance, could have beaten Edison to the punch. Certainly, Edison’s progress was aided immeasurably by his ‘muckers’. Also, Edison’s laboratories, both at Menlo Park and later at West Orange were, for the time, tremendously well equipped. As well as chemical laboratories, the extensive machine rooms and an exhaustive collection of tools, Edison maintained stores that held everything from washers and bolts to samples of elephant hide.8 He boasted that the laboratory could ‘build anything from a lady’s watch to a Locomotive’.9

Flushed with success, Edison turned to thinking of the possibilities for the phonograph, ten of which he outlined in an article for the North American Review. Perhaps surprisingly, the reproduction of music came fifth in Edison’s list, behind letter writing, dictation, book readings for the blind and educational purposes (particularly the teaching of elocution), but ahead of recording one’s family members, toys,10 speaking clocks, advertising and recording the speeches of the great and the good. Edison noted:

The phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music. A song sung on the phonograph is reproduced with marvelous accuracy and power. Thus a friend may in a morning call sing a song which shall delight an evening company, etc. As a musical teacher it will be used to enable one to master a new air, the child to form its first songs, or to sing him to sleep.

In patenting the phonograph, Edison had tried to cover his back by suggesting future modifications and adaptations. Although the tinfoil recording was, by definition, a one-of-a-kind artifact, Edison suggested that the record ‘may be stereotyped by means of the plaster of Paris process, and from the stereotype multiple copies may be made expeditiously and cheaply by casting or by pressing tinfoil or other material upon it’.11 Here, however, Edison was no better off than Cros. He had the idea that it could be done, and outlined the method, but there is no indication that he ever put the problematic theory into action. Aligning the ends of the tinfoil sheet so that the grooves corresponded was a painstaking job. Also, the very quality that made tinfoil suitable for the initial recording, its malleability, meant that once the sheet was taken off the cylinder, it was prone to further inadvertent indentations and thus became almost useless. Edison knew this, but it didn’t deter him from suggesting otherwise. He was reported in the Illustrated London News of 3 August 1878 as saying:

This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words; and, centuries after you have crumbled into dust, may repeat every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you choose to whisper against the thin iron diaphragm . . . You can have a phonograph in your parlour with an album of selected phonographic matter lying beside it. You can take a sheet from the album, place it on the phonograph, start the clockwork and have a symphony performed; then, by changing the sheet, you can listen to a chapter or two of a favourite novel; this may be followed by a song, a duet, or a quartet; and at the close the young people may indulge in a waltz, all joining in it, for no one need be asked to play the dance music.

These were pretty wild claims on Edison’s part. Quite apart from tinfoil being very much a one-shot medium, the fidelity of the recorded sound was not yet good enough for music, and the running time of each cylinder was not long enough to accommodate a symphony or any meaningful part of one.

Contemporary reports display a predisposition to accept unquestioningly whatever line Edison trotted out, however. In the same issue of the Illustrated London News, a Dr William F. Channing was quoted:

We shall have galleries where phonotype sheets will be preserved as photographs and books now are. The utterances of the great speakers will there be kept for a thousand years. In these galleries, spoken languages will be preserved from century to century with all the peculiarities of pronunciation, dialect and brogue . . . Certainly, within a dozen years, some of the greatest singers will be induced to sing into the ear of the phonograph . . . Nothing will be easier than to catch the sounds of the waves on the beach, the roar of Niagara, the discords of the streets, the noises of animals, the puffing and rush of a railroad train, the rolling of thunder, or even the tumult of a battle.12

Actually, at this point, quite a lot would have been easier than attempting to capture any of those sounds, as location recording was all but impossible until the development of electric recording in the 1920s.

Some oddly familiar sentiments can be found in an 1878 book on the inventions of the day, in which author George B. Prescott declared that: ‘The phonograph has quite passed the experimental stage and is now practically successful in every respect and must be regarded as instrumental in opening a new field for scientific research, and making one more application of science to industry.’13

The phonograph was important, but it was far more of a work in progress than Prescott let on. He admitted that its tone was ‘usually rather shrill and piping, but this defect will undoubtedly be corrected by improved instruments’ and that ‘marvellous as this instrument is, it is still quite new and it is impossible to say to what degree of perfection it may yet be carried’.14 It is not clear whether Prescott was blinded by the sheer novelty of the machine or whether he simply wished to buy into the Edison myth. The near verbatim repetition of part of Edison’s newly issued British patent suggests that he was close enough to the inventor to receive sneak previews of the odd document. In the event, the stereotyping never took place and the malleability of the tinfoil surface proved the enemy of preservation. Prescott’s over-enthusiastic claims that ‘utterances of the great speakers and singers will there be kept for a thousand years’15 proved premature, as did Channing’s assertion on the acceptance of the phonograph by ‘the greatest singers’. It took nearer to twenty years than a dozen.

Thankfully, other observers were not quite so credulous. Reviewing what it called ‘Edisoniana’ in January 1879, Punch attributed to Edison the invention not only of the phonograph, but also of ‘the micro-tasimeter, the megaphone and the aeroplane’ as well as being responsible at the age of eight for ‘considerable improvements in the ordinary pea-shooter’ and the addition of ‘more than one note to the compass of the Jew’s harp’. It was also claimed that Edison, at the age of fourteen, had created both ‘an ingenious contrivance to enable persons of an obese habit to pick up things without undergoing the inconvenience of stooping’ and the ‘instantaneous hat-peg’.16 Meanwhile, the hokey tendency of yellow-press biographers to see immense significance and destiny in some random childhood occurrence also came under fire with the revelation that, as a baby on a railway journey with his mother, Edison gazed at the lamp in the carriage all the way to the final destination. ‘The germ of some great discovery may have been latent in that prolonged stare,’ suggested Punch improbably.

Edison’s commitment to tinfoil is odd, when one considers that he was also looking at more robust materials. In his British patent for the phonograph, numbered 1,644 and dated 24 April 1878, Edison even went as far as to suggest the use of copper recording surfaces and the deployment of electroplating to make a matrix from which further copies could be pressed. He also suggested that, for the finished cylinder, ‘Paper or other materials may be used, the same being coated with paratine or other hydrocarbons, waxes, gums, or lacs . . .’17

His laboratory notes show that he did, indeed, experiment with wax as a recording surface. For some reason, however, he decided not to pursue this line of enquiry, preferring instead to see if he could make tinfoil pay.

On 24 April 1878, the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company had been formed by a syndicate of businessmen that included Gardiner G. Hubbard, the father-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell, and Hilbourne L. Roosevelt, a cousin of the politician Theodore Roosevelt. Its purpose was to market and exploit the new invention, paying Edison $10,000 for the rights to market the phonograph and promising him a 20 per cent royalty on any sales. This was another advantage that the American had over Cros. He was an unashamed capitalist, driven to invent things that made money. He grew sentimentally attached to the phonograph, calling it his baby (this in response to press speculation that he and his wife were expecting a third child) and describing it as his favourite of all of his inventions. (Punchpooh-poohed this idea, indicating that Edison’s ‘most cherished invention, and the one on which he rests his surest claim to fame and fortune and the future Presidency of the United States, is his Electric Pen-Wiper.’)18. However, in Edison’s world, even babies had to pay their way.

The topical songwriters were also quick off the mark, if less wounding than Punch. ‘The Song of Mr Phonograph’, allegedly composed by H. A. H. von Ograff, was copyrighted in 1878 and its summary of the invention went:

My name is Mister Phonograph and I’m not so very old,

My father he’s called Edison, and I’m worth my weight in gold.

The folks they just yell into my mouth and now I’m saying what’s true.

For just speak to me, I’ll speak it back and you’ll see I can talk like you.19

The new company enlisted showmen to undertake demonstrations of the new machine all around the United States. Audiences saw and heard the phonograph repeating speech in all languages, as well as sound effects (coughing was strangely effective) and music, and for a while the enterprise did very well. At the height of the craze, one of the demonstration machines was earning $1,800 a week in hirings. Some declared the phonographic cylinders to be a faithful and perfect representation of the sounds that went into the mouthpiece. This was quite obviously untrue, but these early hi-fi enthusiasts were clearly amazed that such a thing was being done, not just well, but at all.20

Not all were as enraptured by the phonograph or its creator, though.

Something ought to be done with Mr Edison, and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope,’ [claimed the New York Times]. Mr Edison has invented too many things, and almost without exception they are things of the most deleterious character . . . Recently he invented the phonograph, a machine that catches the lightest whisper of conversation and stores it up, so that at any future time it can be brought out, to the confusion of the original speaker. This machine will eventually destroy all confidence between man and man, and render more dangerous than ever woman’s want of confidence in woman.21

This idea was well illustrated in ‘Mrs Barstinglow’s Phonograph’, a short story published in the Burlington Hawkeye in early 1878. When Mrs Barstinglow goes away for three days, her husband begs her to stay at home:

‘At one time he protested . . . he could not endure the lonesome house during her absence. And then again he declared that if she must go, he would neglect his office, and let his business go to the bow-wows, and he would go with her,’ but on her return she plays the phonograph and finds that her husband has had his dissolute friends around for drinks and card games, ending with a fight. ‘That’s right! Believe a senseless diabolical piece of monstrous mechanism rather than your husband,’ he beseeches, but to no avail. He took ‘the phonograph out into the back yard and smashed it into so many and such small fragments that it couldn’t reproduce even a steamboat whistle’.22

Although the general public did not agree with this paranoid view of Edison’s achievement, it wasn’t long before the phonographic bandwagon began to lose momentum. The novelty had worn off. Even Edison was diverted, once the limited commercial potential of his ‘baby’ became apparent. In any case, he was now preoccupied with the lucre to be gained from being the first to develop a working system of electric light. By November 1878, all development work on the tinfoil phonograph had ceased, and Edison had contracted his services exclusively to the Edison Electric Light Company.

That Edison switched, seemingly so casually, from one epochal invention to another gives a flavour both of the spirit of the era and the degree to which Edison was in tune with it. It was a magnificent time for invention and innovation. The Illustrated London News set the context most evocatively in its report of the phonograph’s invention:

This is an age of scientific marvels, if not of miracles. To railways and steamboats, making near neighbours of distant provinces and practically bridging oceans, succeeded the electric telegraph, which turned into a verity Puck’s boast of girdling the earth in forty minutes; and now we have that marvellous triad – the telephone, phonograph and microphone.23

The Crystal Palace, which figured in Edison’s early activities in Britain, had originally been erected in 1851 as part of the Great Exhibition, a chance for Great Britain to show off its ‘arts and manufactures’. With James Watt’s steam engine having helped mechanize manufacture where it was previously limited by animal or human strength, coal production in the UK had increased by more than twenty times between 1800 and 1900. The Industrial Revolution was well underway and the items on show at the Palace included factory-made fabrics and the powered looms that produced them, metalwork, agricultural machinery, tools, marine engines, hydraulic presses and other steam equipment. Wonder of wonders, Queen Victoria sent a telegraph message from the Exhibition. Armaments figured in the programme, as did products from all parts of the British Empire. There had also been a population explosion. At the time of the 1801 census, only fifteen towns in Britain had more than 20,000 inhabitants. By 1891, the figure was sixty-three. Those that could afford it were being better served by medicine than at any time before. Although Edward Jenner’s cowpox vaccine for smallpox had been discovered at the end of the eighteenth century, vaccination was only compulsory in Britain after 1853, beginning the eradication of a disease that at one time killed 10 per cent of the British population.

Socially, too, matters were improving. Just as Abraham Lincoln was bringing an end to slavery in the US in 1865, the UK had witnessed the increasing enfranchisement of the populace, brought about by the Great Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867. The provision of education was being expanded as well, with the 1880 Education Act providing elementary education in Britain for children between the ages of five and ten. America was mired in economic depression for much of the 1870s, and inventors like Edison represented hope for the American people, so there was a captive audience for whatever they produced, and as prosperity returned, the interested populace turned into a large potential market.

Electricity had been a possibility since the Englishman Michael Faraday established the principles of electrical generation in 1831, but the creation of a successful electric lamp had eluded inventors. Edison’s work on electric light brought success in late 1879, and for the rest of the early 1880s he was preoccupied with perfecting the system and putting it to commercial use, with financial backing from various sources, including John Pierpont Morgan of the Drexel Morgan banking house. Unfortunately for Edison, his decision to adopt the direct current (DC) system proved to be disastrous, as rival interests made the running with the more powerful and reliable alternating current (AC) system. Even worse for Edison, another inventor, Joseph Swan, who had been working on electric light since 1848, had succeeded at roughly the same time. The result was a long-running patent dispute that ended in a merger of the two inventors’ interests. A further merger had great significance for the electric industry. In 1892, J. P. Morgan arranged for the Edison General Electric Company to combine with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. The result took the name of the General Electric Company. Towards the end of the 1880s, Edison turned his attention towards moving pictures.

While Edison had been preoccupied with electric light, others had adopted his phonographic offspring, among them the expatriate Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell. Bell’s decision to develop Edison’s invention came not, it seems, from a desire to ‘get even’ for the carbon button transmitter, but out of a sense of missed opportunity and not a little self-criticism.

‘It is a most astonishing thing to me that I could possibly have let this invention slip through my fingers when I consider how my thoughts have been directed to this subject for so many years past,’ Bell wrote to his father-in-law Gardiner G. Hubbard on 18 March 1878. ‘So nearly did I come to the idea that I had stated again and again in my public lectures the fundamental principles of the phonograph.’24 Despite his private displeasure at Edison’s head start and the fact that the carbon button device had been sold to the rival Western Union concern, Bell and his associates remained friendly with Edison’s camp. Bell’s wife had been one of the first to write, congratulating the ‘chief mucker’ on his achievement, closely followed by a laudatory missive from prospective investor Hubbard.

Within a couple of years of Edison’s announcement, Bell also had a well-resourced laboratory in which to undertake his work. He had received the French Academie des Sciences’ Alessandro Volta award for inventing the telephone, and had put the $20,000 purse to good use, forming the Volta Laboratory Association in 1880. Devoted to electrical and acoustical research, the VLA established a laboratory in Washington DC, where he was joined by his brother Chichester A. Bell and the English scientist Professor Charles Sumner Tainter. The triumvirate became known as the Volta Laboratory Associates. Initially, the trio worked on improvements to the telephone, gaining eleven patents in this field in 1880 and 1881. Parallel to this, however, they were working all of the time on phonographic modifications and enhancements. As early as February 1880, they had deposited a sealed envelope at the Smithsonian Institution containing some early sketches pertaining to their phonographic work, which eventually became their main project.25

For all of Alexander Graham Bell’s early interest, it was Tainter who turned out to be the prime mover in the Laboratory’s phonographic efforts, aided mainly by Chichester Bell. As eccentric as they come, Tainter’s many bursts of creativity were punctuated by a very English ritual. ‘Tainter was . . . a confirmed tea-drinker,’ remembered Fred Gaisberg – who began his long career in the music business in Tainter’s lab at around 1892–3:

Indeed, he taught me how to brew and enjoy it. The perfume of that special China blend of his haunts me still. Between the cups he would mount the diaphragm and adjust the angle of the cutting stylus. In his clear Yorkshire voice he would test them with, ‘Caesar, Caesar, can you hear what I say – this, which, s-ss-sss.’ The stress was always laid on the sibilants, these being the most difficult sounds to record. In playing back the test, at the slightest indication of the ‘s’ sound, he would smile with joy and treat himself to another cup.26

After countless brew-ups, Tainter and the Bell brothers returned to the Smithsonian on 20 October 1881. This time they brought with them a sealed box containing a device they called a ‘graphophone’, along with various documents concerning its construction and use, as well as a couple of contemporary newspapers. Most important, however, they included a cylinder upon which Tainter had recorded: ‘G-r-r-G-r-r- There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamed of in our philosophy – G-r-r-I am a graphophone and my mother was a phonograph.’27

There was indeed a strong family resemblance between the two devices, although the relationship was more one of identical twins than of mother and child. Put bluntly, the crude hand-cranked graphophone deposited in the Smithsonian was almost indistinguishable from the Edison phonograph, in all but one crucial detail. Instead of using tinfoil, Tainter and the Bells had persevered with wax recording surfaces, in which the recording stylus cut the groove rather than indenting it, and produced a cardboard-centred wax cylinder, roughly 2 inches in diameter and 4 inches in length. The result was a recording of much higher quality than could be achieved with foil. This step forward came at the cost of volume: the graphophone was audible only through rubber tubes attached to the listener’s ears.

Some work still remained to be done before the graphophone was ready for public consumption. In the event, Chichester Bell and Tainter did not apply for a patent until 27 June 1885. Why it took four years from the Smithsonian submission to the patent application is one of the great mysteries of the record industry’s early history, but what is clear from Tainter’s notebooks is that these four years were a period of constant development activity. When the Smithsonian deposit was made public in