Are You Ready for the Eddies? Thomas Edison, the Grammys and the History of Sound Recording

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Thomas Edison lost much of his hearing when he was still a child. “I have not heard a bird sing since I was 12 years old,” he once remarked. But that did not stop him from inventing the phonograph, a device that for the first time recorded sounds and played them back, in 1877, when he was 29 years old.

Edison had, in many ways, invented a whole new way of experiencing the world through sound. It seemed appropriate, then, that in 1958 the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was thinking about naming their music industry awards the the Eddie to honor Edison’s contribution, before deciding on Grammy, after the gramophone.

Above: A sketch of Edison speaking into a tinfoil phonograph. Top image: Edison listening to his was cylinder phonograph in 1888. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

Edison’s invention engraved sound vibrations captured by a diaphragm on a rotating tinfoil cylinder. The rotation movement created a single long groove and allowed Edison to replay the sound by retracing it with a playback needle. (The gramophone, which gave the Grammys its name, is essentially the same thing but with the grooves laid out as a spiral on a disc. That innovation belongs to the German-American inventor Emile Berliner.)

Edison’s first phonograph from 1877. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

According to documents from the Museum of Innovation andScience in Schenectady, “thephonograph was the result of a process of pure reasoning” and Edison’s deepknowledge of the telegraph and the telephone.

“I wasexperimenting on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking machine of today,” Edison told a biographer. “From my experiments on the telephone I knew the power of a diaphragm to take up sound vibrations. Instead of using a disk, I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was placed tin foil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm.”

Edison put a price on the machine - $18, the equivalent of $390 today – and asked a worker named John Kruesi to make it from a sketch (see below). “I did not have much faith that it would work, expecting I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope for the future of the idea,” Edison told a biographer. “Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking and then have the machine talk back. He thought it was absurd. After it was finished the foil was put on. I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb, etc.’ I adjusted the reproducer and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken back in my life. ”

A signed copy of the original sketch that Edison made for Kruesi. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

The device made Edison immediately famous. (He didn’t invent his commercial-grade light bulb until two years later.) On April 18, 1878, he traveled to the White House at the request of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who wanted to see the machine.

Edison later switched to wax cylinders. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

According to the Thomas Edison Papers, the phonograph “made Edison’s reputation as the ‘Inventor of the Age’ and led to his most famous nickname ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park.’ Newspaper reporters flocked to the Menlo Park Laboratory to see the new invention and to interview Edison.”

Fans of his phonograph left behind many tinfoil recordings. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Library of Congress are using some of the latest, non-invasive scientific techniques including 3D imaging and optical scanning to digitize them and preserve them forever. Edison would surely find the interests as well as the technology intriguing.