The 1888 Crystal Palace recordings

In the beginning came the telegraph...

In the beginning, Edison wasn't looking to invent a machine to record and reproduce sound at all.

In 1870 or 1871 Edison started to work on improving the automatic telegraph which used perforated paper tape to accelerate the transmission of telegrams. He noticed that when the tape ran quickly through the lever set up to read it, vibrations were produced which created an audible note.

Edison's idea was to develop a method of translating the Morse code indentations on the tape and printing it out on tape as letters. This brought Edison into contact with a former Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury, George Harrington.

Through Harrington an agreement was made with the British General Post Office that Edison would visit England in 1873 and demonstrate his automatic telegraph. Edison's contact in England was a previous colleague of Harrington's in the US Treasury who was to play a large part in Edison's later life, and in the development of the phonograph, Colonel George E. Gouraud.

Edison's test was to transmit between London and Liverpool. Unknown to him, until he was tipped off, he was given an old cable belonging to the Bridgewater Canal and very old-fashioned batteries. Having upgraded the batteries he was successful and was then asked to demonstrate over submarine cables. To do this, he worked overnight in Greenwich:

Colonel Gouraud came down one night to visit him at the lonely works, spent a vigil with him, and toward morning wanted coffee. There was only one little inn near by, frequented by longshoremen and employees from the soap-works and cement-factories - a rough lot - and there at daybreak they went as soon as the other customers had left for work.

"The place had a bar and six bare tables, and was simply infested with roaches. The only things that I ever could get were coffee made from burnt bread, with brown molasses-cake. I ordered these for Gouraud. The taste of the coffee, the insects, etc., were too much. He fainted.

"I gave him a big dose of gin, and this revived him. He went back to the works and waited until six when the day men came, and telegraphed for a carriage. He lost all interest in the experiments after that, and I was ordered back to America."

Edison states, however, that the automatic was finally adopted in England and used for many years; indeed, is still in use there. But they took whatever was needed from his system, and he "has never had a cent from them." [Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Lewis Dyer]

While he was in England, Edison must have met William Henry Preece, a forty-year-old engineer with the General Post Office's telegraph team. Preece would go on to become Engineer-in-Chief, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and receive a knighthood.

Preece published a paper in the July 1873 issue of the Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review on duplex telegraphy (using a line to send telegraph signals simultaneously in opposite directions) and this caught Edison's attention.

Preece visited the USA in 1877. I haven't yet discovered whether this was to visit Alexander Graham Bell in connection with his recently "perfected" telephone (demonstrated the previous year at a meeting of British Association for the Advancement of Science Glasgow) to visit Edison in connection with the Edison Company's introduction of its quadruplex system in England later in the year (or both). In any event, he visited Edison in May 1877. Preece wrote to Edison in June 1877:

Remember that the British Association takes place [at Plymouth] in August. It is the great opportunity in England to bring any novelty before the public, so that if you have anything fresh to enable one to start in the world with, remember that this is your chance. I shall be very glad to bring anything you may have out there.

After Preece had left to visit Bell in Boston, George G. Ward wrote to Edison:

I want to keep the Society posted in what Edison is doing (of course anything this is not private), as after Preece gets home, I know they will be anxious to hear occasionally.

I am glad you are getting your speaking Telegraph on towards perfection. Did Preece tell you that he had nearly 2 days with Bell in Boston?

Preece appears to have been given a couple of Bell's new telephones and demonstrated them at the British Association meeting in Plymouth in August.

Edison obviously wanted to have his telephone demonstrated alongside his rival's, for he wrote to Preece on 3rd September:

I am very sorry you did not receive the Telephone in time. I will send you pair of speakers in a week or two. The W[estern] U[nion] take them from me. The solicitors who took out patent is Brewer and Jensen, Chancery Lane, London.

Comparative trials between mine and Bell's on the lines of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Co proved 1st that the articulation of mine was far better, 2nd that it was four times louder, 3rd that there was no noises [sic], 4th that it worked on every wire tried and but few wires were found that Bell's could be worked on owing to cross leakage...

...P.S. Smith and Hamilton leave on 5th with the Quad[druplex] - I hope you will give them a wire that don't run on the Bridgewater Canal like Lumsden gave me - give my respects to Lumsden.

Edison wrote again to Preece on 6th September to give him further criticism of Bell's telephone, and to ask him how the trials of Bell's telephone have progressed at Sir William Thomson [later Lord Kelvin]'s laboratory.

Edison's next letter followed on 9th September. He had spotted a small advertisement in the New York Tribune for a book on the telephone by Professor Dolbeare of Tufts College. On enquiry, he had discovered that the book had been suppressed and that Dolbeare was claiming that he had invented the telephone and Bell had stolen it bodily from him. He ended his letter with the words:

Please let me know when the next Conversazione of the Royal Society takes place? I shall probably by able to send you for exhibition something so novel that it will startle them out of their boots.

These can only refer to the new phonograph.

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