When *could* recorded sound have started?

[JHolmesesq]

I've been pondering over this recently. We all know about the phonautogram experiments and other early attempts at sound recordings made in the late Victorian era.

Yet it has struck me that the tools and technology required to do this have been around for ages. All you essentially needed was a horn and a needle, and I have no idea why people didn't investigate it sooner.

When do you think people could have been theoretically able to record sound?

[USlakeside]

The one crucial development was when we obtained a "true screw", which actually took a very long time to produce both on a case by case basis, and over the centuries. Although there were screws for centuries, it wasn't until they could be replicated by mass production that they became as accurate and fine as they are today. I think this occurred in the later part of the 18th century.

Without a screw to guide a stylus, there was little possibility to mechanically reproduce sound efficiently.

I do recall reading about "accidental" recordings of sound on ceramics. When a potter would throw a bowl, then say use a fine reed while it rotated to incise a decorative line, it may have captured background noise. But I don't know if any true examples have been found and it is likely not possible.

[TinfoilPhono]

The alleged ancient recordings in pottery, which unfortunately have been publicized widely as fact, derived from an April Fool's joke by a Belgian filmmaker, Bilge Sehir, in 2005. The original French-language "news report" can be seen here.

[gregbogantz]

Lakeside, you make an interesting point and one that I have pondered from time to time. This is OT, but not entirely since antique phonos all depend on the machine tool capability of the era in which they were made.

Can anybody supply a book reference or an online link to a detailed description of the development of the earliest machine tools? How did the first genuinely high-precision flat surface get machined? Such surfaces are necessary for the sleds required to build quality milling machines and lathes. How about making accurately straight shafts of iron or steel that are actually sufficently accurately round where they need to rest in bushings so that they rotate concentrically? Today, these things are routinely made using equipment that is itself already built to a high precision. But how did this develop into sufficient precision in the age of wood and axes?

The earliest constant-pitch machine screws must have developed, I am guessing, from the development of gears. Which presumably were hand-cut at first. Putting together the appropriate gear speed reduction train with associated shafts and levers would have also reduced and averaged out the errors in the gears and eventually enabled a constant pitch thread to have been cut on a lathe. Each successive development would have enabled even finer precision to be made with the newly higher-precision-hobbed gears made possible by greater precision in the threaded leadscrews that held the hobbing cutters which would then lead to finer precision in making even more accurate threaded shafts. I guess. Anybody know more about this?

[dennis]

In a yet-to-be discovered Egyptian tomb, there resides a curious plate of solid gold with a spiral groove on it. It is mounted on a miniature potter's wheel device that has a strange horn and other bits and pieces mounted to it as well.

[phonogfp]

Some of Edison's early experiments with "reproducing" sound involved simply pulling a piece of treated paper through a slotted mouthpiece fitted with a stylus. I don't think the availability of fine tooling was the catalyst for sound recording/reproduction. Note that I used quotation marks above for "reproducing" sound. Until 1877, that concept involved simply the mimicry of sound. The actuality of recording and playing back sound was as alien to mid-19th century folk as the Internet would have been to mid-20th century people. When Edison finally discovered that he could "play back" telegraphic dots and dashes in a somewhat musical fashion, he still didn't quickly grasp that if he could only somehow record human speech, he might do the same thing with it. Grasping the concept of freezing sound waves onto a solid surface was the major delay in developing sound recording. Once that concept had occurred to Cros and Edison, the idea then had to be reduced to practice - however crude. Tinfoil phonographs allowed both recording and reproduction to occur in a demonstrable form, but I wouldn't call most of them precision machines.

The British were producing the Long Land Musket using interchangeable parts by the late 1700s. I'll bet if Edison had approached one of the gun contractors at the time and drawn out the plans for the tinfoil phonograph with the instruction, "Nigel, make this," we'd have had the talking machine a century earlier than we did!

George P.

[estott]

Precision screw cutting and milling machines appeared around the mid 18th C. as did reliable steel springs, and by the 1770's this led to the accurate adjustments needed for navigational tools and accurate watches. There are 18th C. machines extant today that exhibit a high degree of mechanical sophistication. If someone had come up with the idea of a Phonautograph around 1800 it could have been built. It's possible that a tinfoil machine could have been built around that time, I'm not certain when the production large sheets of tin or lead foil in quantity was practical.

[penman]

In a yet-to-be discovered Egyptian tomb, there resides a curious plate of solid gold with a spiral groove on it. It is mounted on a miniature potter's wheel device that has a strange horn and other bits and pieces mounted to it as well.

Wasn't one just like this just on Ebay recently?

[Wolfe]

Sometime after it could have found the inventor tried and executed for practicing witchcraft or sorcery.

[USlakeside]

I read "One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw", which details the authors quest for what he considers the most important tool ever invented. His logic is really great, and the stories are equally as engrossing. It is off topic, but I do believe there is a slight phono mention. Anyway, it was really this invention that paved the way for the phonograph.