The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

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.

Nat wrote: 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!

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 ???

"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 wrote:

coyote wrote: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

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