Popular Historical Myths Debunked
A lot of our cherished historical myths come from the late- 1800's to early 1900's, a sort of golden age of inventors. I'm going to start with the myth that Tom Edison invented the phonograph. He didn't. If you're in a city where the university is also a patent repository, get out that roll of microfiche and see for yourself that Edison's patent is an improvement patent, meaning that he was improving on an exiting patent.
What he invented was what he told the Patent Office was a talking machine, a player of cylinders--not platters. The actual founder of the phonograph AND the entire recording industry was German immigrant Emile Berliner, and close on his heels was a technician who worked for Alex Bell's laboratory, but all his gizmo would do is play back a platter...but...he told the patent office that his gizmo was a graphophone. Emile Berliner's was the legendary Victrola.
Well, good ole Emile was generous with his licensing agreements while Edison was tight-fisted...not sure about the lab tech with the graphophone because it wasn't exactly Bell's own invention...but you can bet that the big familiar names here were all in hot competition to out-invent the other, and they didn't think twice about borrowing ideas from each other, either.
And so it came to pass that the popularity of the platter out-did that of the cylinder. By early 1900's, 3rd party recording manufacturers had stopped recording cylinders altogether, forcing Edison to go platter...and again, he took the improvement-patent route, claiming that his platters could play 1,000 times without deterioration of recording quality. His platters were a quarter inch thick, too. Patent fight with the other two? Edison saw that coming and what he did was go through the trouble to patent his machine in Britain to avoid challenges to his obvioius knock-off.
Emile Berliner authorized licenses widely, including Europe, causing a typewriter company to become Angel Records--we now know the giant as EMI for which Angel is but one of the labels. Victrola, of course, morphed into the giant Radio Corporation of America, RCA. That Bell tech didn't do so badly either. His graphophone established Columbia Records, and because the term "graphophone" was a trade name, the generic term for such record players became "phonograph."
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