Shipwrecked phonograph from Yukon gold rush discovered

[Starkton]

Here is another fat loot for underwater archaeologists!

In the early 1880s, Edison shipped his own tinfoil phonograph together with other objects to his Florida laboratory. The sailing-ship conveying the goods was struck by lightning and abandoned at sea.

[Tinkerbell]

But if the ship sank in a storm, one has to doubt if they were playing records when it went down - you couldn't keep the needle in the groove!

Good point! Guess it makes for a better, more romanticized story to picture the ship sinking to the sounds of music playing... Oh wait, where am I? Seems I've heard this story before... Are we on the Titanic??

I guess plagiarism (with a little spin) is alive and well!

[JohnM]

My Phono-L response to this romanticized BS is that making statements like that is sloppy scholarship. Does the woman actually think that a ship that size sank in under 1m30s ???

[Andersun]

"The CCI's lead researcher on the project, senior conservator Tara Grant, told Postmedia News that part of the thrill of studying the items was the fact that ``almost no one has seen a record come out of an archeological site. They were probably playing it when the ship went down."

HOGWASH!

Here's a pic of the ship.

The water and weather had to be pretty calm to play a phonograph on that ship, that's if there was room to play it and the workers were nice and quiet! Also, I can imagine the ship's steam engine had to be loud. It's possible but very unlikely.

Best scenario it was being brought to the worker's campsite when the ship sank.

[Brad]

Thanks for posting this! One wonders: if they can identify the records, can they identify the phonograph?

Cool! I will be riding my bicycle along the AlCan highway through Whitehorse this summer and will stop at the museum and check it out. Hopefully it will be on display and I will see if I can get better pictures.

I'm back from my bike ride and I see I have a lot of posts to catch up on. I tried stopping at the museum to see if I could see this machine, however, the day trip we did the day I was there did not get us back to town until after the museum had closed for the day so I never got the chance. , however, I did get to ride the White Pass and Yukon narrow gauge railroad to Skagway for the day

During the whole trip I only had one phonograph encounter at a museum in Teslin Yukon Territory. It must be some kind of experimental disc recording set up. I could not locate the curator to ask what is was

[edisonplayer]

I'd like to find out more about the ship that Edison had sailing for Florida that sank in a storm in the 1880'sedisonplayer