"Play it Back for Me!"

"Play it Back for Me!" The Phonograph's Addictive Sound that Swept Victorian England

1860: The Phonautograph and the First Recorded Sound

For over a century, scholars have agreed that the first recorded sound was a result of the phonograph, an invention created by the acclaimed inventor Thomas Edison. However, a recent study from 2008 revealed that Edison was not the first person to play back a recorded sound. That credit now goes to Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Frenchman and writer who wanted to find a way to get his ideas onto paper in a more creative way. He thought he had created the first "speech-to-text" machine (imagine having the "microphone" option in iMessage, but in the mid-1800s). He was not originally searching for a device that was able to play back anything; rather, he wanted to create a device that would act as an "ear," transcribing and interpreting whatever it heard (Flatow and Feaster 1).

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's device, pictured above, used a "barrel" of plaster as its receiving device. It traced soundwaves and frequencies onto a piece of blackened paper or glass, and was intended only to study the acoustics of the space. It was later discovered by Leon-Scott, however, that what he recorded could be played back by his own device (Flatow and Feaster 1). In April of 1860, this resulted in the first decipherable playback recording, which includes Leon-Scott singing a French folk tune, "Au Clair de la Lune." That recording can be heard below (MacKinnon 1).

Now, to most modern ears, this does not sound like much. It is a one-minute recording of a simple tune, fragmented in both frequency and clarity. However, when it was discovered in 2008, it was a huge finding. Not only was this incredibly clear sound quality for the technology that was available in 1860, a new, previously unknown inventor was found to discover a concept before Thomas Edison had done so.

1878-1888: Edison's Phonograph

These were interesting words for a man who invented the second, and arguably the most sensational, device to play back recorded sound. However, the truth is that Thomas Edison was simultaneously a creative genius and partially-deaf at the same time. Coincidentally, the phonograph (or gramophone, as it was often called) was one of Edison's favorite inventions. Slightly dissimilar from Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's device, Edison's phonograph contained a piece of tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder in the middle of it. Inside this cylinder was a needle. While turning a handle on the side, one would make noise into the cylinder, and the needle would etch the speaker's sound waves into a piece of tinfoil. A second needle on the other side of the tinfoil played back what had just been recorded (National Parks Service 1).

The first phonograph recording was of Edison himself, speaking "Mary Had a Little Lamb." That recording, however, has permanently been lost. Other tinfoil recordings are only able to be listened to at museums, such as the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. In 1887, Edison observed that the tinfoil would quickly crinkle up and become unusable after a few playbacks, so he replaced the tinfoil with wax (Daily News New York 1). The next readily accessible recording is from the next year, 1888, and is considered the world's first full recorded piece of music. It is of a piano and cornet, a piece entitled "The Lost Chord."

This recording is more successful in terms of its longevity and its ability to be deciphered as a piece of music. However, the sound is still extremely muffled and scratchy compared to later phonograph recordings. To Victorian listeners, however, this would be considered a peaceful background noise with which they would eventually relax at home.

The Phonograph as a Source of Memory

The invention of the phonograph meant that voices and stories could live on long after they had been spoken. For many in the Victorian era, this excited the element of keeping a loved one's memory alive, just as it did with the photography of deceased relatives. When a loved one passed, Victorians believed that they could keep those loved ones' memories alive by listening to recordings that they spoke into before death (Kreilkamp 180).

Joseph Conrad, author of the Victorian novel The Heart of Darkness, and other Victorian authors saw possibility in one's voice being "disembodied," in one's narrative being told through something other than the present time (Kreilkamp 181). This was not only sensational, but could even be considered "horrific;" when considering a former loved one's voice that could come from another source than the voice of the loved one themselves, it almost gives the phonograph a concept of "beyond the grave," a ghostly feel.

1888: Queen Victoria's Voice

Although the eerieness of recordings of the dead is a topic that is up for debate, the historical merit of these early recordings is undoubtedly significant. This is especially in the case of an early recording of Queen Victoria, who was known for her secrecy and reluctancy to share personal information. In fact, Edison had requested to record her voice three separate times on his phonograph, but she denied all three requests. She did, however, eventually agree to record her voice on Samuel Morse's graphophone, a cylindric recording device very similar to Edison's phonograph. Even after recording the Queen, however, Morse was warned "not to tour the country playing it." Morse considered this recording his "greatest possession; and would pass it to his children as his chiefest treasure." Although he could not generate revenue from it, he recognized its historical value. It was known that Morse would play it for his grandchildren in the 1920s, but then he died, and the whereabouts of this recording disappeared for 50 years (Dash 1).

This all changed, however, in the 1970s, when two grandchildren of Sydney Morse, Mary Barton and David Morse, recalled an old phonograph recording that was played to them when they were children. Mary could not remember much of the recording, but David Morse seemed to remember the Queen's brief exchange very vividly (Dash 1).

It was not until 1991, however, when Sydney Morse's recording of Queen Victoria was played publicly (Dash 1). She seems to be addressing her fellow Britons, although, like many old recordings, it is difficult to decipher. Below are two different versions of Victoria's recording.

This recording is the original and completely unretouched. It is difficult to decode any words at all, and it is easy to see why historians would have such a difficult time in proving that the recording is indeed of the late Queen.

This recording uses modern-day digital enhancements and subtexts in order to more easily understand the Queen's speech. As brief and puzzling as her speech may seem, the concept of the recording itself is what makes the phonograph and similar inventions such a revelation in the late 1800s. Early Victorians would have paid an arm and a leg just for a single listen of this recording. It brought about the concept that, not only could one have visual representations of the Queen in one's own home through portraits, newspaper articles, and other ocular means, one could also hear her in the home. The Queen of England could speak directly in one's ear as one was knitting in their parlor. One could have a professional opera singer give a private performance of an aria without even being there. The possibilities for technological connection seemed endless for the Victorians, and would later seem endless for historians. Through the finding of this recording and later technologies, historians could study Queen Victoria in a manner closer than ever before.

The Marketable and Sensational

Perhaps the phonograph's most lasting innovation is its impact on the music industry as a whole. Music became more accessible than ever before. One of the first instances of media-sharing came in the form of coin-operated phonographs, a concept created by Albert Keller. Passers-by could pay by inserting a coin into the machine, then listen to several minutes of audio, dialogue, or (most commonly) music. This was the first construction of a "jukebox," and it was an instant success. Listeners could hear everything from vaudeville stars to operatic arias (Erb 1). The next logical step was to start selling phonographs to households, and to sell recordings that would easily correspond with these at-home phonographs. Soon, advertisements began to pop-up in newspapers all over the world, marketing specifically to women, children, and the elderly, who would be spending the most amount of time at home (Roy 185).

In Victorian England, the phonograph was a device that swept the masses. It bridged a gap between "the traditional and the new; the domestic and the global; private leisure and mass consumption" (Roy 184). Previously, the only way to access music was to hear it live. Pianos were popular in Victorian homes, and the matriarch of the household would often learn how to play one in order to entertain her family's guests (the concept of the domestic figure being a musical one was also very popular in Victorian literature). With the invention of the phonograph, music-listening could be a technological, personal experience. Quickly, Victorian housewives became the majority of the music-buying public, becoming mediators of "mass-produced entertainment and the sanctity of the home" (Roy 185).

The phonograph was quickly featured in newspaper articles alongside the telephone as the major "topic of the day" (Roy 185). The phonograph was also a source of visual consumption for the Victorians; pictures of the device on advertisements (like the ones showed above) awed the readers, and they were even moreso awed when this massive, foreign device appeared in their friends' homes. Multiple senses were awoken when experiencing this novelty;

Nevertheless, it is not until 1896, when the home phonograph was invented, that Victorians see this accessibility put into action. Up until then, the phonograph was just a fantasy at which one would marvel, restricted to the homes of the wealthy or to public spaces, like the coin-operated phonograph seen above (Roy 190). Once the home phonograph became accessible in the 1900s, however, it spread like wildfire. This was not only a public spectacle of entertainment, it also served philosophical purposes.

With the phonograph being a recreation of sound, the Victorian listener had to recreate the experience of listening in his or her head (Roy 192). This appealed to both the Victorian imagination and the imagination of those across the globe. By listening to the same recordings on the same device, a Victorian could be having the same experience as an American, creating a sense of national cohesion (Roy 194).

1903: The Technological Musical Instrument

When the word of the phonograph caught wind, musicians and manufacturers alike realized that they would have to tailor the music industry to fit the needs of the phonograph. In its earlier developments, wax cylinders were only able to play back 2-3 minutes of recording. The popular live music of the 19th and 20th centuries, typically symphonic and orchestral works, tended to run much longer than that. Because of this, composers worked diligently to get their works down to an appropriate size. Russian composer Igor Stravinsky wrote each movement of his "Serenade in A" to fit a three-minute side of a disc. Blues and folk songs limited their length to one verse and a chorus or two (Thompson 1).

The limiting sound quality of these recordings, however, still proved to be a problem for musicians. Female sopranos sounded, for lack of a better word, awful in these recordings, especially when they reached into their upper range. Bands would reorchestrate their instrumentation in order to achieve the clearest sound; this meant having to rearrange the types of musicians hired for different recordings. Largely agreeable, though, was the fact that the male tenor sounded quite lovely on a phonograph, and this was enhanced by the popularity of one of the earliest musical recordings. In 1903, the Victor Talking Machine Company recorded European tenor Enrico Caruso, and the recording was so successful that the company had to rush production of copies in order to meet the demand (Thompson 1).

Above is a modern-day playback of that same recording from 1903. In 20 short years, the phonograph had made leaps and bounds in terms of sound-quality, and is certainly a stark contrast to the phonautograph of the 1860s. Edison constantly made revisions to his phonograph, and spent 50 years "perfecting" it (National Parks Service 1). The improved clarity can also be observed in the recording below, in a recording of Alessandro Moreschi entitled "The Last Castrato." For context, a "castrato" is a male who was castrated in order to retain a high, soprano or alto-like singing voice. This practice was banned in 1903, but certainly made for an insightful recording of Moreschi.

Phonographic Controversies

Every invention has its critics, and the phonograph was no exception to the rule. Critic Friedrich Kittler argued that the phonograph posed a threat to literature and marked the end of literary Romanticism. Before the invention of the phonograph, writing and books were the only sources of the recorded word, and the phonograph removed literature's "special place of honor." He even argued that the sensation of literature: the raw, heart-racing adrenaline that comes from reading a novel, had become artificialized by the technology of the phonograph (Kreilkamp 181). Even more daunting to Kittler was the fact that the phonograph could literally "inscribe" a message onto wax or tin-foil, much like a writer's pen-to-paper (Kreilkamp 187). The phonograph also posed a threat to authorship, since the author was theoretically "disembodied" of his own voice; without the right context, a specific phonograph recording could have any origin (Kreilkamp 183). Other critics went so far as to say that the phonograph foreshadowed the "death" of the present human voice (Kreilkamp 182). The phonograph's sensational popularity also made critics fear society's extreme infatuation with the technological.

However, others like Lisa Gitelman argue that representation was already so prominent in Victorian literature that it inspired Edison to create his invention in the first place (Kreilkamp 182). Others argue that the concept of a disembodied voice is so eerie that it is even more sensational than Victorian literature itself. It was also argued that these recordings were not historical, that they were merely fragmented recordings of everyday lives of the Victorians that could not be linked to a sequential chain (Kreilkamp 191) . Proprietors of the significance of the Queen Victoria recording, however, would claim this to be farce.

The Phonograph's Eternal Etch on History

To illustrate the progress that the phonograph had made over its 50 years of renovations, here is a walkthrough of a later model of the phonograph which could play a record; in this case, a piece by jazz great Nat King Cole.

As the phonograph's recordings became more and more decipherable, its future became more and more clear. It was the first source of a large-scale music invention, which is perhaps why music listeners of today can easily relate their feelings to those of the Victorians. The widespread sensations that came with the invention of the record player, of the CD player, and of the iPod can all find their sources in the invention of the phonograph. It took the language of music and made it truly universal, and music today still claims to be the most universal language that exists.

The demise of the phonograph came around 1935, after years of renovations and new models, to the creation of the first tape recorder, the jukebox, and the record player (Timetoast 1). However, in a literal sense, its recordings and history have superseded it. It is the first model of music sharing, the first model of individual imagination in music listening, and, of course, the first way to play back recorded sound. Because of this, we have a listenable timeline of music history and a basis for which all other music sharing is pressed upon. A sensation that began in England and the United States soon became worldwide, and the world received its first taste of an audible national identity. The worldwide phenomenon of a spreading music sensation (we can now have a "worldwide" #1 song on the Billboard charts) began with a smaller sensation, the invention of the phonograph.

Works Cited

73Notelrac. "Worlds Oldest Recorded Music "The Lost Chord" 1888." YouTube. YouTube, 02 July 2011. Web.

Burns, Francesco. "Sounds of the 1860s: Listen to the Earliest Recordings Known." Classic FM. Classic FM, 04 Jan. 2016. Web.

Dash, Mike. "In Search of Queen Victoria's Voice." Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution, 06 Oct. 2011. Web.

Erb, Ernst. "Jukebox: History of Coin-Operated Phonographs." Radiomuseum. Radio Museum, 20 June 2009. Web.

Flatow, Ira, and Patrick Feaster. "1860 'Phonautograph' Is Earliest Known Recording." NPR. NPR, 04 Apr. 2008. Web.

Kreilkamp, Ivan. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller. Vol. 49. N.p.: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

MacKinnon, Eli. "Edison Voice Recording Is Old, but Not Oldest." LiveScience. Purch, 26 Oct. 2012. Web.

PaganaProfana. "Alessandro Moreschi, The Last Castrato, Ave Maria." YouTube. YouTube, 17 Jan. 2012. Web.

"The Phonograph." National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, 26 Feb. 2015. Web.

"Phonograph Timeline." Timetoast. Public Domain, n.d. Web.

"Soundtrack to History: 1878 Recording Unveiled, including World's First Blooper!" NY Daily News. Associated Press, 25 Oct. 2012. Web.

Storey, John. The Making of English Popular Culture. N.p.: Routledge, 2016. Print.

That1940sguy. "Nat King Cole (swing Jazz) on 78 Rpm Record Player Phonograph." YouTube. YouTube, 02 Sept. 2010. Web.

THEVICTROLAGUY. "TOSCA / ENRICO CARUSO / 1903 / CYLINDER COPY." YouTube. YouTube, 08 Apr. 2013. Web.

Thompson, Clive. "How the Phonograph Changed Music Forever." Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution, 01 Jan. 2016. Web.

Timothycan. "Queen Victoria Voice." YouTube. YouTube, 02 Oct. 2010. Web.

ToneSpectra. "The First Known Recording of a Human Voice, from April 9th, 1860. (Phonautograph Etching)." YouTube. YouTube, 21 Aug. 2010. Web.

Twiddlybobby. "QUEEN VICTORIA'S VOICE - DIGITALLY REMASTERED." YouTube. YouTube, 10 Oct. 2016. Web.

Appreciate