One of the many thrills of living the life of a Victorian must have been the development of the ability to record sound and therefore to mechanically (later electronically) reproduce the human voice. Several ideas and inventions were put forward including this one from Charles Sumner Tainter in 1888 reported in The Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough:
Another instrument for recording sound has been brought over from America, known as the Tainter Graphophone, the inventor of Mr. Charles Sumner Tainter. In the essentials of construction this latest sound a writer is practically the phonograph under a new name.
Speech or song of communicated to it and threw a mouthpiece which is attached to the diaphragm. The latter vibrates in exact and really wonderful accord with the voice –much as the tympanum of the ear must do –and a minute steel point cuts on the waxen surface of a cylinder a curved hair line which also accurately corresponds to the diaphragm.
So fine are the lines traced the at 160 of them, with equal spaces between, would lie within an inch; and yet with such nicety are they traced that when the motion is reversed and the stylus again goes over the curve, the diaphragm is once more set in vibration precisely as before, and he gives back to the ear the same sounds as was sung or spoken into.
Mr. Tainter claims to have been the first to employ wax instead of tinfoil or some other metallic surface –and this is the most important element in the recent marked improvement in the art of sound recording.
You can read more about Charles Sumner Tainter here.
Ian Waugh
Old British News
