The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Yep, a Roomba has been cleaning my house for several years now. Of course still a far cry from the human like cleaning robots we imagined decades ago, just like a smartphone is far from what Bell imagined when he worked on the telephone. Who would have thought that some day every functionality from telegraph, telephone, picture telephone, photo camera, film camera, dictaphone, phonograph, book library, encyclopedia, and so on would be in a small device in everyone's pocket? Of course it looks different from what these individual devices looked like, but nevertheless. And I'm sure 50 years from now kids won't understand why we would put up with such inconvenient things, because they may have a chip in their brain that does the same and much more. Therefore I am absolutely certain that something like a 3d printer at some point will be able to recreate anything we can imagine in whatever resolution we want.

To me one exciting part of collecting phonographs is to try and imagine how it must have felt to people who grew up before electric light and radios etc. Like Arthur C. Clarke said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." This was true for the new technology 100 years ago and it is true for today and it will be true in the future as well. Can you imagine the wonders our kids and their kids will create, based on what humanity invented before them? For one of us it would truly feel like magic if we could live to see it.

Andreas

3D printing is today quite advanced, and in our hobby I see its use not for printing records, but for the production of spare parts of long gone machines, especially those made of dreaded pot metal. These parts can be ordered and made today to a reasonably high accuracy (but not exactly cheap) if the blueprints are accurate enough. As to copying records, there are more precise methods to reproduce the sound recorded on the grooves, rather than copying the whole record physical medium. The work done to read and play the phonoautograph is a remarkable example of the use of current technology (search for the Au Clair de La Lune recording). This same technology can be used to recover moldy cylinder records.

Give it a few years and I'll b able to programme, cut and stitch and 3d print conversations and interviews that never happened: Rudolf Hess at a dinner party with the Duke of Hamilton, Himmler and Begin discussing arming the Stern gang...

I do this a bit with photos...but old fashioned 120 film