Re: Tesla vs Edison
Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2014 6:47 pm
I think that taking into account Leon Scott and Charles Cros the Phonograph would have been invented by someone sooner or later - Edison's mechanically inclined mind put two and two together. He gained himself a great deal of valuable publicity with the Tin Foil machine, and when it reached the end of its usefulness (and commercial potential) he and his staff put together an improved version that not only worked better but was commercially viable.VintageTechnologies wrote:Are you referring to Leon Scott or Charles Cros?Amberola wrote:He surrounded himself with brilliant minds, he may have not even had the idea of the first phonograph.
While Lecon Scott did build a machine to graphically record sound waves, he apparently never considered the idea of reproducing sound.
Charles Cros did theorize the concept of sound reproduction a couple months before Edison built the first phonograph, but he never attempted to test his idea.
Edison was the first to conceive AND build a phonograph. There were several unlikely stories told over the years how Edison arrived at the concept. I think the most credible was the story that Edison wanted a telephone repeater that would accomplish the same function of a telegraph repeater, to extend the range. It was a simple and logical progression of ideas [repeaters] with an unexpected result. After the initial idea of an electro-mechanical machine to store and repeat telephone signals, Edison suddenly realized that he had conceptualized a talking machine. After that, he may indeed have run a piece of waxed paper under a needle mounted to a telephone receiver as a quick test of his wild idea.
