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Matters of Record: © 1999 This is a conference version. For a bibliography and citations or to cite or quote please contact the author at gitelman@cua.edu; Program in Media Studies, Department of English, Catholic University, Washington, D.C., 20064. Some of the research used here has been published in another form, “The First Phonographs: Reading and Writing with Sound” Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 8 (Fall 1999) 3-16.
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When the phonograph was first demonstrated to the American public in 1878, it was promoted and received as an invention that would revolutionize print. The “speaking phonograph” or “talking machine,” as it was then known, was able to record as well as reproduce sound. (It would not be widely adopted as an amusement device for musical playback until the 1890s.) Throughout 1878 and for more than a decade, the phonograph seemed to offer an unprecedented link between aural experience and inscribed evidence, between talk and some new kind of text. The recording surface was at first made of tinfoil. Indentations on the foil “captured” what the inventor Thomas Edison called “sounds hitherto fugitive” for later “reproduction at will.” Accounts of demonstrations performed during 1878 indicate that the public was both enthusiastic and skeptical. Audiences responded simultaneously to the unprecedented marvel of recorded sound and to the unreasoned hype surrounding its early, imperfect demonstration. (Those early recordings were faint and full of scratchy surface noise.) Despite such mixed reactions, audiences at the phonograph demonstrations consistently and eagerly took scraps of tinfoil home with them when the lectures were over. This paper addresses those souvenir scraps of indented foil. Such primitive records were clearly meaningful to the women and men who sought them and who were probably asked at the breakfast table the next morning, “What does it say?” -- Without the phonograph for playback, the tinfoil records of course said nothing. These sheets of foil were talismans of print culture. They were pure “supplement,” illegible and yet textual. Considered in this light, they help suggest ways in which the genealogies of non-print media offer a means to explore the changing status of print, rendering (if you like) part of the sociology of printedness. I want to think about what those souvenir strips of tinfoil meant, but first I should fill in a little of the story, how it begins anyway, since you all know how it ends: music as a portable commodity, vinyl and magnetic tape giving way to CD’s, and now MP3 files, Napster, and the like. |
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The story begins in late 1877. Thomas Edison took his prototype phonograph to the New York City offices of the Scientific American magazine and amazed his audience. Witnesses reported how the phonograph greeted them and inquired after their health. The thing that fascinated them most was the sheer simplicity of the machine; it was “a little affair [made of] of a few pieces of metal,” (they noted) not the complicated, electrical contrivance with “rubber larynx and lips” that might have been imagined. The tinfoil recording surface was wrapped around a cylinder rotated by hand. Indentations made on the foil formed (it was said) “an exact record of the sound [waves] that produced them” and comprised (what was termed) “the writing of the machine.” These words or “remarks,” could then be “translated” or played back. Observers seemed for a time to believe that translation might be performed painstakingly, by using a magnifying glass to read phonetic dots and dashes, but the really remarkable aspect of the device arose (they marveled) in “literally making it read itself.” It was as if, “instead of perusing a book ourselves, we drop it into a machine, set the latter in motion, and behold! The voice of the author is heard repeating his own composition.” Here was a kind of writing emptied of its habitual alphabetic and chirographic artificiality. Here was a kind of reading devoid of any literacy and any labor beyond the turning of a little hand crank. In statements to the press Edison enumerated the phonograph’s use for writing letters and taking dictation of many sorts, as well as for things like talking clocks, talking dolls, and recorded novels. Music was mentioned, but usually as a form of dictation: you could send love songs to a friend, sing your child a lullaby and then, if it worked, save up the same rendition for bedtime tomorrow. In keeping with the important public uses of phonetic shorthand for court and legislative reports, the phonograph would also provide a cultural repository, an archive for sounds. The British critic Matthew Arnold had only recently defined culture as “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” and now the phonograph could save up the voices, Edison suggested, of “our Washingtons, our Lincolns, [and] our Gladstones.” And there was plenty more to save. The American Philological Society, Edison reported to the New York Times, had requested a phonograph “to preserve the accents of the Onondagas and Tuscaroras, who are dying out.” According to the newspaper, only “One old man speaks the language fluently and correctly, and he is afraid that he will die.” (I’ll return shortly to this fear of death, but first:) The contrast described between “our” statesmen and the dwindling Onondaga hints that the phonograph was immediately and powerfully an instrument of Anglo-American cultural hierarchy. It became party to habitual distinctions between an “us” and a “them,” even as it might rescue indigenous American languages from oblivion. Drawing a similar distinction, Punch magazine satirized that “our best poets” could be publicly disseminated by young women using phonographs, taking the place of the “hirsute Italian organ-grinders” who walked about the streets of London. -- Another version of “us” and “them.” Perhaps, someone else suggested, a giant phonograph could be installed in the new Statue of Liberty, then under construction in New York Harbor, so it could make democratic announcements to passing ships. Reality seemed hardly less fanciful. With this remarkable device, published accounts made clear, women could read while sewing. Students could read in the dark. The blind could read. And the dead could speak. In the year or so of public demonstrations that followed, Edison’s device continued to intervene between orality and literacy, between aural experience and inscribed evidence. Demonstrations were organized under the auspices of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company and its manager James Redpath, lately of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau. Though they varied greatly in character, depending upon the venue and resources of exhibitors, the exhibitions seem to have shared certain components. First and foremost, an explanation of the device was given, followed by demonstrations of recording and playback. The substance of these demonstrations was characterized by one exhibitor as, “Recitations, Conversational remarks, Songs (with words), Cornet Solos, Animal Mimicry, Laughter, Coughing, etc., etc.”; he described getting a lot of laughs by trying to sing himself, but he also tried to entice volunteers from the audience or otherwise to take advantage of local talent. Newspapers reported of another such event that the exhibitor recorded “selections from Shakespeare and Mother Goose’s melodies, laughed and sung, . . . all of which were faithfully reproduced, to the great delight of the audience, who received pieces of the tin-foil as mementos.” Several points are worth remarking. These demonstrations relied upon a familiar rhetoric of educational merit. Lecturers introduced Edison’s machine as an important scientific discovery by giving an explanation of how it worked. Then the “how” was confirmed in successive demonstrations of recording and playback. Audiences learned and they enjoyed. It was a double message that formed part of the established vocabulary of the lyceum movement in America, which long sought to sugarcoat education within an elaborate ethos of social improvement. Phonograph exhibitions flirted with the improvement of their audiences in three ways. There was first a tacit participation in technological progress offered to all in attendance. There was second a tacit and playful engagement with good taste. In making their selections for recording and playback, exhibitors made incongruous associations between well known lines from Shakespeare and well known lines from Mother Goose, between talented musicians and themselves, between animal and baby noises and the articulate sounds of speech. Audiences could draw and maintain their own distinctions, laugh at the appropriate moments, be in on the joke, party to the enactment of cultural hierarchy to which I have already alluded. There was thirdly and importantly a transcendent benediction of local experience. Local audiences heard and saw themselves materially preserved on bumpy strips of tinfoil. Audiences in the meanest church basements were recorded just like audiences in the grand concert halls of New York and New Orleans. Audience members might imagine themselves as part of a modern, educated, tasteful, and recordable community of similarly modern, educated, tasteful, and recordable people across the United States. Let me stress again that the phonograph was in some measure an experience of textuality, of print and of printedness. Phonograph company executives wrote tellingly to each other that a means must be found for “stereotyping” or “electrotyping” records once they were made, drawing their terminology from common printing processes of the day. Journalists dilated on the prospect of “Edison’s imprinted words.” One burlesque of the phonograph exhibitions specified “slips of white paper” as the recording surface in its stage directions. And everywhere the term “record” gained an additional connotation. Those sheets of tinfoil were public records in a new way. It was not just that metaphors of writing and printing were being deployed; the literal language of texts was being stretched to encompass these new material forms. In their “capture” and later mute evocation of public experience, pieces of tinfoil in private hands formed souvenirs of immense power. They were belongings that vouched for belonging, their very materiality inspiring a demonstrable continuity of private and public memories. Susan Stewart’s words on what the souvenir accomplishes in general are particularly suggestive here. She writes that, “Within the development of culture under an exchange economy, the search for authentic experience and, correlatively, the search for the authentic object become critical.” And further,
Clearly the desire for tinfoil was the desire for authenticity, for what had really transpired. More than any souvenir program, calendar, pencil, or key chain, though, the tinfoil records suggested the authentication of actual sounds that had been shared. -- Shared by listeners, but also shared by the machine, its sensitive and yet entirely insensate body on the table in plain sight at the front of the demonstration hall. I’m moving here toward Stewart’s distinction between events that are repeatable and events that are only reportable and that therefore invest the souvenir. The phonograph demonstrations were indeed only reportable, not repeatable. -- It was devilishly hard to get a tinfoil record back onto the machine once it had been removed, and certainly impossible to reproduce anything from it when it had been ripped up and distributed among the audience. -- Still, what was reportable about the demonstrations (to stick with this language for one more second) was precisely repeatability. Narrating the meaning of the tinfoil at breakfast meant testifying to the pending usurpation of that very narrative. The desire for authenticity would finally be consummated, when some soon and now imaginable souvenir spoke for itself. The relationship between matter and event, between stuff and utterance, was changing. |
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What happened next? In one sense, nothing. Phonograph demonstrators across the country had shortly “milked the exhibition Cow pretty dry,” as one insider put it. The phonograph would wait almost a decade for any further development, joined by a twin, the graphophone, and a sibling, the gramophone, all of which replaced the tinfoil recording surface with more durable matter, wax tablets, which unleashed a spate of hieroglyph and cuneiform analogies into the language of records and talking machines. In another sense, however, souvenir sheets of tinfoil entered an ongoing discernment of materiality. I can open this question best by returning to the Onondaga if not the organ-grinders, to “our” best poets if not “our” famous statesmen. It seems clear to me that Native American speakers and singers formed cardinal subjects for the phonograph. Note that against the three functional registers of the phonograph demonstrations outlined above -- (1) up to date-ness, (2) tastefulness, and (3) localism,-- Indians like the one in the New York Times were constructed as symbolic OTHER, charged with meaning precisely according to the differently acknowledged facts of a declining demographic, shrinking cultural and linguistic groups. (That I know of, Indians did not make records until the first ethnomusicologists began recording on wax in 1890, but that is neither here nor there, a story for another day.) As a means of preservation, the tinfoil phonograph helped raise emphatic questions of loss for which Indian-ness formed a symbolic reservoir of longstanding. (Finally then, a surprise ending of sorts:) If there was one old Onondaga who yet spoke, and was “afraid that he [would] die,” I think it might be profitable to look around in American culture of the period for other versions of this fear of death. Where I think we can find it is in the professionalization of literary study and corresponding canon formations, as well as in the disciplinary formations of linguistics and comparative philology, with their implications for the future of the English tongue. Where I (personally) want to look next is in the so called “new bibliography,” a movement in turn-of-the-century textual studies bent on producing authoritative editions of “our best poets,” out of the certain fear that texts-by-authors lose something in books-by-printers. How much easier if we could “drop [texts] into a machine, set the latter in motion, and behold! The voice of the author is heard repeating his own composition.” |
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