Thomas Edison had been devoting alot of his time and effort to developments to the telegraph. One of these was a method of recording the "dots" and "dashes" as indentations on a paper tape which could then be replayed to replicate the morsecode message. Edison noticed that if the tape was fed through the player at a high speed, the sound of the reader on the paper tape bumps sounded a bit like voices. He began to wonder if it was possible to actually record human speech in a similar maner.
To make a long story short, it was possible, and within 24 hours of presenting a drawing to his chief machinist, Edison uttered that famous nursery rhyme, "Mary Had A Little Lamb" into the world's first tin-foil phonograph! Very few of these early tin-foil machines were produced, since the operator required quite a bit of expertise to create any kind of recognizable recording, but "road shows" took these devices out to the masses where for a quarter you could see and here the "amazing talking machine".
Wax cylinders soon replaced tin-foil and although Edison saw his device as a business tool (for dictation, etc.), he eventually gave in to the public desire for entertainment, and prominant vocalists were hired to create recordings. At first, each cylinder was directly recorded, with as many as five machines recording a performance at one time.
Emile
Berliner (xxxx-xxxx), a Jewish German immigrant, modified
Edison's concept and used a flat disc for the recording media instead of
Edison's cylinders. The disks were easier to store, less fragile, and could
easily be stamped for mass-production from a single original. Seeking the
aid of a Camden, NJ machinist, Eldridge Johnson, Berliner manufactured
several models of talking machine. The first was a direct drive mechanism
that was very difficult to regulate the speed of.
After
receiving so much work producing machines for Berliner, Johnson soon devoted
all of his business to producing these machines. He made several enhancements
and modifications, including the addition of a spring motor with a governer
to regulate the speed.
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