1888 Scientific American graphophone illustration

[Edisone]

July 14 1888 .... The article claims that the records can be "repeated a thousand times". hah !

[Roaring20s]

Absorbs a bounty of information!

James.

[FloridaClay]

Absorbs a bounty of information!

James.

Ohhh, baaaaaaaaaad. Love it!

Clay

[De Soto Frank]

I hate to be the nark that spoils the fun, but I don't get it ?

From the engraving, what I take to be the "paper-towel tube" is one of the early "ozcerite" cylinders ?


( Maybe I'm having one of my "Dense days" )

[Roaring20s]

It's ok Frank!

It has no depth whatsoever.
It's just an abstract observation with an twist of the absurd.
A humoristic pause from all of the serious talk.

like this pretend ad...
http://forum.talkingmachine.info/viewto ... =2&t=17764

Phono-nerds making fun of themselves.

James.

[VintageTechnologies]

From the engraving, what I take to be the "paper-towel tube" is one of the early "ozcerite" cylinders ?

Yes, exactly.

[edisonphonoworks]

The first cylinder I ever made was about 12 years old, and I took a toilet paper tube, split it so it would fit on my Dictaphone mandrel, then covered it in crayon wax, did not work well but I tried.

[Phototone]

Yes, the first commercial "Columbia" machines, designed for office use for dictation used a cardboard cylinder coated in Ozcercerite, which I guess is a type of wax.

[edisonphonoworks]

I know I am I am going to kill this thread as I always do. But has anyone actually played and recorded on the B.T. machines? I have never heard one, would be interesting! you can't judge something you have never heard. I would like to know how many times they can be played and reproduced, the reproducer actually looks very lightweight (the duckbill Gutta Percha affair) So maybe they do not wear out bad, but maybe they do, what is the stylus made of? I tend to look to reverently at these when they are in collections, instead of spending the hours asking questions, and looking closely.

[Chuck]

My own private opinion about how those B.T.
machines must apparently work, is that they
are not very good, at all.

These were made and attempted to be used
in the interim period between 1879 and 1888
when Edison was busy working on lighting up
a small portion of New York City with
electric lighting. Edison was busy with
little minor details such as contstructing
a viable dynamo to supply the needed electric
current for that project, and he was also busy
constructing the Pearl Street generating station.

While he was busy doing all of that, he
allowed these other clowns to build whatever
versions of cylinder phonographs they wanted
to make, because he knew that none of them
would ever amount to much.

So, we had the B.T. machines with their
small-diameter ozocerite-coated cardboard-lined cylinders. I know from personal
experience, from experiments I myself have
done, that ozocerite is some very harsh,
very gritty-sounding, very soft stuff to try
to use to record and play sound with.

My guess is that in a voice test (a talking
record), that anyone would be hard-pressed to
be able to understand one single word upon
playback, using those machines and those
cylinders. That's what it all adds up to,
to me.

Read between the lines there. Read some
contemporary accounts from that era, from
people who actually tried to use those things.
Not good.

So, when Edison finally decided to get back
to the phonograph, and work on it some more
and to improve it, he did so and made all
of those other attempts look very crude
by comparison.

Chuck