Victor Day--85 years on.

[Lenoirstreetguy]

Herbert Berliner ( my avatar) and his Compo Company developed a system of electrical recording in 1924 and issued electrical sides on Apex before Victor. It was one of the reasons Canadian Victor 'fessed up to introducing electrical recording in June of 1925: because Compo was beating them to the punch AND advertising about it. I think his earliest commercial electrical recordings were done in late 1924. I'll do a scan later.
Jim

[Wolfe]

There was an experimental electric recording made on 11 November 1920 at Westminster Abbey of the burial of the unknown soldier. Lionel Guest and Horace Merriman used 4 carbon mikes to record the service, which later was released on records by Columbia in the UK.

Unless I'm mistaken, those mikes were just ordinary telephone mouthpieces (transmitters.) Sent signal via remote lines to another location where it was taken down to disc. That's what I've heard anyway.

And I'm not sure of the recording setup, but I think it possible that the cutter stylus on the lathe was just linked to the diaphragm of a telephone receiver, picking up the signal from the 4 transmitters inside the Abbey. With primitive results, as can be heard there, and elsewhere where that recording has turned up.

[Lenoirstreetguy]

Guest and Merriman met during WW 1 . Horace Merriman was a trained engineer who had graduated from the University of Toronto. During the war the two were trying to develop a loudspeaker which airplane pilots could hear from the ground. They used a variation of the Fessenden Vibration motor driven by mic and amplifer which then activated a compressed air sound valve of the type used on an Auxetophone. Hence they had developed a sort of electronic/mechanical hybrid. After the armistice the two decided to swing their research into the realm of recorded soundm using the Vibration Motor without the Parsons attachement. The motor seems mainly to have been a big solenoid which acctivated a stylus bar, but I'm only guessing here. At any rate,the cutter was not a telephone receiver. The money behind this experimentation came from Lionel Guest's family, but the London branch of Columbia was interested and tests were made in the Columbia studios. As well , the experimental sides were processed by the Columbia plant. Merriman has written that much of the impediment to their research was the fact that Columbia wasn't about to give away any secrets, and the two experimenters had to teach themselves how to cut a wax master. The result of all this was the Abbey recording mentioned above. And you can hear that it IS electrical but it sounds pretty awful because of the distortion on every crescendo. Mike Biel pointed out in his groundbreaking work on early electrical recording that most of the early experimenters,...including Guest and Merriman.... missed the fact that their electrical cutters needed mechanical damping in order to smooth out the resonances introduced by the mic, the amp and the cutter itself. The Western Electric cutter used a vane attached to the stylus bar which they embedded in rubber. The one who DID grasp this was Herbert Berliner. He dampened a Baldwin loudspeaker unit with cotton wool and was thereby able to make effective recordings. Marsh must have done something of the sort as well. I have one Marsh recording which sounds all right, but rather pinched and limited in sound. This was issued on Berliner's Apex label which suggests there was a bit of cross pollination between the two.
I'll scan some images of the Merriman equipment later.

Jim

Done!!! This is from the Illustrated London News.

[Wolfe]

Thanks for all that.

Pretty involved setup there in the 'motor lorry' if on the whole it looks technically pretty inefficient. I would be interested to find out what else they attempted recording with that, before it was discarded.