Meet Edison's Tinfoil Phonograph from 1877
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.ย. 2024
- This is the earliest machine for recording and playing recorded sound. That's right. This is from a world in which there were no voicemails, no podcasts, or karaoke nights. In comes Thomas Edison. See how it works in this video with Curator Carlene Stephens. Visit the machine in person at our "America's Listening" display, opening October 19, 2018, in the Ray Dolby Gateway to Culture.
Everything was impossible until someone did it.
Exactly!
yep
I had a smallish collection of Edison phonographs for a number of years. Playing them and playing with them was some of the greatest fun I've ever had. Hearing 100+ year-old voices from the original recordings made the back of my neck tingle.
We were just reading about Thomas Edison in a Life of Fred math book, and your video gave us a better understanding of what the machine looked like.
Thomas Edison’s hi-fi setup lol.
Ready for one more Saturday night.
What is more cool is that despite the year it was invented, a few humans that were around when the cylinder phonograph was useful lived to see the inventions from the 2000's and half of the 2010's. Octogenarians, Nonagenarians, Centenarians, and Supercentenarians can teach you a lot about the past.
This was purely Edison's. There were experiments in which a diaphragm and needle were used to make traces on lamp-black covered glass, but these were meant to help analyze sound waves, not to store sounds. A century or so later a computer was used to scan these traces and thus reproduce, after a fashion, the sounds (French words, I think) that were uttered to make them. Edison's patent utterly startled everyone, for there were no precedents whatsoever for the reproduction of sound.. He was thirty, almost deaf, but had already developed the ticker tape machine and the concept of a dedicated research lab.
After his machine proved a success, it was thought that it would be used solely as a dictating machine (I think Dictaphone was Edison's company.) Music recordings were an afterthought.
Edison's records would have been better if he could have heard the music, and his movies would have been better had he not developed into a first-class curmudgeon, but there is no question that he was a true genius. And no, he didn't steal any of Tesla's work: two geniuses seldom work together very well. The difference is that Tesla wandered off into mental illness by middle age (it happened to many such people who did their finest work in their youth) but for whatever reason Edison maintained his composure and productivity throughout his long life.
Earliest machine for playing back sound, not recording it.
Leon Scott deserves more recognition, especially since his records have now been played back.
Why does Scott's invention deserve more recognition since it had little to no impact on history and wasn't used for anything?
The phonograph plays back sound and the design is fundamentally different from the phonautograph.
It was only in 2008 that sound recorded from the phonautograph was played back since the design is so different from a phonograph
Edison’s phonograph had a massive impact on history since almost every analog audio playback device copied the same concept from the phonograph...basically improved phonographs.
The phonograph created a revolutionary change in technology and had a massive impact on engineering and physics too
The phonograph and Edison deserve more recognition considering the massive impact the phonograph had on history being the very first device in all of human history to playback recorded sound, creating a revolutionary change in technology, and having a massive impact on engineering and physics....Edison should have won a Nobel prize for the phonograph
What about the 1857 Phonautograph invented by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville? That's where you can hear the 1860 "Au Clair de La Lune" recording.
Scott created a system for putting sound waves on paper, but had no way to play them back. Edison came up with a system of recording AND playback. Edison invented his system independently and is the one who created a practical phonograph. Scott is irrelevant to anything.
@@cuthbertallgood7781 I thought this was a nice and helpful reply till the last sentence 🤣Not that I need to defend my query but I simply felt it would have been cool to mention the phonautograph since it was a predecessor. Thank you for the clarification anyway!
@AvitalShtap but he's right Scott's invention had little to no impact on anything and is nothing like the phonograph which almost all analog audio playback devices copied the same concept no one actually used Scott's invention for anything
A beautiful machine! Could definitely use a little clean up, some oil, and a new crank handle.
found a rebuild kit on amazon, 8 bucks.
can't imagine how he reached the invention without maths and physics education
Maybe just like Michael Faraday, the father of electricity did his inventions without math or physics education...don't forget Edison also did the first detection of electromagnetic waves in 1875 well documented with a working apparatus long before Hertz did in 1889 but isn't given credit....Edison is an underrated figure in history
TE didn't invent it, he just improved on scott's idea.
True
How ridiculous just another Edison hater...Scott's phonautograph had no impact on history or anything and is fundamentally different from the phonograph in design...almost all analog audio playback copied the same concept from the phonograph whereas no one used the phonautograph for anything....just another Edison hater with false propaganda
Amazing!
Wow!
That machine must be worth an INSANE! amount of money
in 200 year they are going to look our technology like, saying like they used google really ?
y’know thomas edison didn’t invent sound recording
Scott did right?
Vintage and Antique Automobiles yeah
he probably just paid for it .
Some French dude did it a decade or two before, but keep in mind that his invention went completely unnoticed, even in his home country. Not to mention that the sound from his machine was basically unintelligible without massive audio correction, and even then it still sounds like a garbled mess.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. Scott created a system for putting sound waves on paper, but had no way to play them back. Edison completely independently came up with a system of recording AND playback. And even if someone earlier had come up with a similar idea, Edison is the one who made it practical, and that's ALL that matters to giving credit to who invented something, full stop.
Could this be used again to record more recordings do you think?
yes, but it's better to not, as it's the only one of it's kind
@@gunnarthefeisty That’s fair. It would just be really amazing to see it working again.
@@therestorationofdrwho1865 you'd have to replace parts
@@gunnarthefeisty wait wtf? Only 1? That's ridiculous I want to see it in action but if there's only one it better be preserved omg :(
It seems that it could. The needle is there, just needs for foil to be wrapped on the drum. You would need a sensitive microphone to hear the reproduced sound as there is no horn. Otherwise, I see no reason it would NOT work as is.
Can you kindly let me know whether Edison Amberola 30 could be use for primitive recording by wrapping a tin foil to the cylinder and use of an adaptor with a needle
Are there any adaptor in the market. Thank you. Gehan
do you know what words are recorded on the tinfoil
His first recording was a recitation of "Mary Had a Little Lamb' a year earlier. Perhaps the same?
“Marry had a little lamb it’s fleece was white as snow and everywhere that marry went the lamb was sure to go”-Thomas Alva Edison 1877
The rumor was that the original recording was a saucier version of “Mary had a...”:
Mary had a new sheath gown
It was too tight by half
Who gives a damn for Mary’s lamb
When they can see her calf!
Haw! Haw! Haw!
THANK YOU!!!
fascinating
The recording when it was new would likely be better than what it is today
Awesome possum
1877-2000s Tin foil to Hifi audio... 👍❤️
The real inventor is Leo Scott but Edison took the credits
Edison’s favorite hobby was taking credit for inventions he didn’t make
@@unoriginalclips9923 true
Edouard Léon-Scott wanted to see sound recorded - period. No playback, just sound waves made visible.
Edison wanted to play it back, as well; voices preserved, so they could be listened to once more.
Those two approaches are quite different.
Can we all just appreciate the contributions of these inventors without discrediting one another. Why the need for such? It's so childish.
@@Leofwine And my great grandfather, Emile Berlliner, by using a disc and (unknowingly) reverting to Scott's lateral incision, made it mass-producable.
He didn’t invent it, he perfected it.
The phonograph is an actual Edison invention, it's the lightbulb that Edison improved.
DA GREAT PHONAUTOGRAPH
The phonograph is not an improvement of the phonautograph it is fundamentally different in design and nothing like a phonautograph...it's just Edison clown haters with their false propaganda probably from those clown conspiracy Tesla fans...nutcases
Wrong edouard leon made this machine but some how edison gets the praise just like he did with the lighbulb
No, Leon's machine couldn't play it back. Edison's could.
Why is the world just hearing of stuff like this? Plus how come i never in 48 years heard that in the 20"s there was a machine that talked to the dead. 😅 Used as entertainment & had its own radio program.
İngilizce olduğuna bir halt anlamıyorum Edison un yaptığı fonografmıymış neymiş ne diyo anlamıyorum ne diyon teyzem
1:38 '70's music! 1870's music, to be sure, But I had some 8 Track tapes from the NINETEEN 70's that ware almost that distorted. LOL. While ol' T.A. Edison did NOT invent the light bulb, (I am from a Westinghouse family, So I heard of the "battle of the currents" for my whole life!) Edison DID give us records, that was a pretty cool thing. An overlooked thing about Edison's original phonograph, it was a RECORDER and a PLAYER. Later phonographs sold to the public were (mostly) players. While making disk records at home was a "thing" it was NOT very common, Magnetic tape would make "home recording" a more common "thing", and THAT revolution would only happen in the 1950s.
:)
🤓🤓🤓🤓🧪😉
0:08
Wrong, a French inventor beat him by more than 15 years
yes . his last name was Scott .
No, the French inventor invented a machine for recording (on paper), but it couldn't play it back. If you listen to what she said carefully, she said the first machine that could record and PLAY BACK sound.
@@CableFlame oh , yes . correct .
his machine could not play back recordings
How did he know what he recorded worked? Huh?
Odd mouth