Earliest *Phonograph recorder?

The process didn't require any real super technology; just a simple idea. If he had thought about it, perhaps even Heron of Alexandria might have come up with it. Imagine, going to a temple and hearing the voices of the gods, not just some priests.....


Tomac,

The ancients had any number of speaking, singing, and music playing machines. For that matter so did many civilizations across Eurasia and up through the 19th Century.

There were plenty of machines that produced sounds. What hadn't been seen before was a machine that recorded a produced sound and then played it back.

Quite frankly, I cannot see how that could have been accomplished before accurate screws could be repeatedly manufactured.


Bill
 
Well, we could hope for the possibility that screw standardization and production itself would be sped up as a consequence... or perhaps we could have a very well crafted (and expensive) "phonograph screw", where the pitch is kept constant and exact by painstaking hand-craftsmanship... something the Swiss watchmakers of that time would surely be capable of. Maybe some watchmaker will pick up Franklin's idea...

Even if the phonograph is invented in the 1800s... that's still ahead of OTL by 50-something years. Would we see a steam-powered record player? :p
 
... or perhaps we could have a very well crafted (and expensive) "phonograph screw", where the pitch is kept constant and exact by painstaking hand-craftsmanship...


Elidor,

While such screws could be crafted, each would be different from the other and thus effect the ability of one machine to play back a cylinder recorded on another. When we write about repeatedly cutting screws with constant thread pitch, we're talking about interchangeability; screws will both fit and perform the same way in any given machine

... something the Swiss watchmakers of that time would surely be capable of.

Watches, the purchase of which for strictly personal use instead of for maritime navigation only entered the reach of the upper classes after Maudslay began producing machine tools, and clocks are different mechanically because they reply primarily on gears, not drive screws, and can be "tuned", that is their speed can be minutely adjusted. Because of this "tuning", watches and clocks needn't be made from interchangeable parts. Each can be it's own machine, a precise machine, and still tell the time accurately.

The marked difficulties MacCauley and I have experienced in this thread trying to describe and explain what are basic mechanical concepts is rather telling. There was a time when these concepts were taught to students, in particular boys, as a matter of course. I was on the "college track" in middle and secondary school and I still had to take drafting, shop, and "power" classes. (Of course, being the son of a man who sold machine tools helped too.) Such schooling is no longer the case.

Just as people have been more divorced from and unaware of how their food is grown and produced, over the last few decades people have become more divorced from and unaware of how their manufactured goods are produced. "Manufacturing" to too many people now conjures up the wholly inaccurate picture of someone sitting in a cubicle and tapping on a keyboard, there is no longer any real comprehension or appreciation of how things are actually done.

It's rather sad.


Bill
 
There WERE amazing mechanical machines invented/created in the 18th century, so to say "only watches" is something of a mauve herring.

I was going to say something else too, but I've forgotten what it was...

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
The question now is: Could the techniques required for manufacturing the consistantly threaded screws be developed earlier? And if so could a phonograph be produced earlier than 1800?
 
The question now is: Could the techniques required for manufacturing the consistantly threaded screws be developed earlier? And if so could a phonograph be produced earlier than 1800?
With such POD (modern manufacturing technologies before 1800), there would be not only phonographs available for George Washington and George Hannover, but also, for example, machine guns, steam locomotives and so on. It would be completely different world.
 
There WERE amazing mechanical machines invented/created in the 18th century, so to say "only watches" is something of a mauve herring.


Grey Wolf,

Not a mauve herring exactly, more like my inability to explain exactly where the problem lays to a post-industrial audience like yourself.

There were hundreds, thousands, of exquisitely crafted mechanical mechanisms in the 18th Century. Natural philosophers of all kinds had thermometers, barometers, telescopes, timepieces, pumps, and dozens of other types of devices. As amazing as all those devices were, they lacked the one thing you immediately and subconsciously assume when you hear the term "machine"; standardization. All of those devices were essentially "one-offs". All of those devices were entirely hand crafted, each and every piece in those devices were hand crafted also. A screw, a rod, a weight, a tube, each and every piece was unique making the devices that contained them unique too.

When a part broke or wore out, it's replacement would have to be laboriously hand-crafted and, more often than not, the new part was still varied enough to necessitate a lengthy period of readjustment to the machine in question. Because of this, machines weren't repaired as much as they were rebuilt.

When Harrison and his son built, tested, adjusted, and rebuilt their maritime chronometers over those long decades, the time keeping accuracy of the devices wasn't the only obstacle they face or even the largest one. A large portion of their time was spent in making parts that had to then be laboriously fitted together in an "operational" sense. A mistake in tolerance or too great a tolerance in one part could have deleterious consequences for the operation of the chronometer as a whole.

Any phonograph constructed in the same manner would face the same problems. No two phonographs would be alike enough to play cylinders recorded on the other with any degree of fidelity and a "repaired" phonograph would essentially be a different phonograph too. Even thread pitch variations in the same drive screw in the same machine would result in enough speed variations to distort recordings during playback.

I think it's telling to note that, while Harrison and his son did eventually win the longitude prize with the chronometers in the early 1770s, maritime chronometers remained rare and costly until the early 1800s when Maudslay developed the machine tools necessary to produce their component parts accurately and quickly.

Could some famous tinkerer like Heron of Alexandria or Leonardo have built a wax cylinder phonograph? Perhaps. Would that device have been anything other than a one-off toy with limited utility for anyone else without Maudslay's innovations in machine tooling? Undoubtedly.


Bill
 
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But wouldn't one off devices be pretty amazing on their own? The idea that every man should own a watch, a car, a washing machine was only made possible by the rise of wealth. Back in the days of monarchs, those ego-maniacs would love to record their voice for eternity. Historians would have a lot more to work with.
 
But wouldn't one off devices be pretty amazing on their own?


Tallwingedgoat,

Yes very much so. They'd be like the chess playing "turk", mechanical orrery, earthquake detector, flying chariots and other geegaws princes, potentates, and emperors have delighted in for centuries. Didn't the Byzantine emperors have a flying throne, mechanical singing birds, and mechanical roaring lions they used to overawe barbarians?

The idea that every man should own a watch, a car, a washing machine was only made possible by the rise of wealth.

The rise of wealth and the development of machine tools.

Back in the days of monarchs, those ego-maniacs would love to record their voice for eternity.

Yes, but would an ego-maniac want his voice on play back to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks? Variations in a hand-crafted feed screw will result in changes in speed which will change the pitch of the sound being played. Unless the cylinder is placed the machine in the exact position it was in at the beginning of recording and unless the machine's internal components are in the exact position they were in at the beginning of recording, the play back is going to suffer from major fidelity issues.

Would our wealthy ego-maniac even recognize the play back as his own voice? Doesn't everyone say when first listening to themselves on tape that their voice doesn't sound like that?

Historians would have a lot more to work with.

Yes, if the cylinders were stored correctly and hadn't been played often enough to permanently damage them. Every play back degrades a mechanical record remember.


Bill
 
Akahito,

I'm sorry, but you don't understand the engineering involved.

Keeping the cylinder revolving at steady pace presumes a fixed pitch for the screw's threads. Also, seeing as there will be no indication that any given screw's thread pitch has changed until the sound changes, any "adjustment" by the person cranking will occur after the fact.

Without machined screws, each screw will be different and the cranking "style" or "rhythm" required will vary from machine to machine making comprehensible play back of a recording made on one machine very difficult on another.


Bill
Wow, I was being stupid there. I completely, utterly forgot that the cylinder needed to move sideways as well as turn at the same time. And this is from a me, a person that actually owns a phonograph:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: Yeah, you're absolutely right.
 
When you are able to repeatedly cut screws, both accurately and in industrial numbers, and there is no reason why the phonograph can't be invented immediately afterward. All of the other components have been around since the Classical Era if not before.

What do you mean when you use the term 'Classical Era'? Are you implicitly thinking of Foucault's idea of the _episteme_ when you write of the importance of identically cut screws? That is, a breaking-point in the history of ideas/devices/etc?

An early 19th century machine-screwed phonograph could be a POD for a whole sunburst of various inventions. And, according to the Foucault model, the simultaneous appearance of many similar inventions after a certain 'spark' invention would necessarily demonstrate the proper evolution of history, and not some fluke event.
 
What do you mean when you use the term 'Classical Era'?


Proximefactum,

Greeks, Romans, etc. How long have wax, needles, drums, and horns been around? How long have humans known they can make noise with something other than their voices? Everything you need for a phonograph aside from the machined screws has been around since the Fertile Crescent.

Are you implicitly thinking of Foucault's idea of the _episteme_ when you write of the importance of identically cut screws?

You mean that gibberish from Foucault's The Knowledge of Things? Not in the slightest. That's just a bunch of over-thought nonsense, IMHO, just another case of parsing a question well past the point of irrelevance.

When I write about the importance of identically cut screws with constant thread pitch along their lengths I'm writing about the actual parts needed to make a phonograph physically work and not about some "paradigm shift" or other philosophical rubbish. I'm writing about reality and not about navel gazing.

That is, a breaking-point in the history of ideas/devices/etc?

The breaking point is this instance occurred when someone got his hands dirty and figured out how to repeatedly cut accurate screws. Nothing more.

An early 19th century machine-screwed phonograph could be a POD for a whole sunburst of various inventions.

The late 19th century phonograph was a sunburst too. It sparked all sorts of developments, like the one we're chatting on now.

And, according to the Foucault model, the simultaneous appearance of many similar inventions after a certain 'spark' invention would necessarily demonstrate the proper evolution of history, and not some fluke event.

Foucault and the others got it wrong.

It isn't that everyone was sitting around too stupid to imagine that something like screws could exist and that the idea of screws weren't somehow part of the general discourse of knowledge. It wasn't as if lathes hadn't existed for centuries or that people hadn't been using them. There were physical obstacles at work, primarily the availability of steel. There were no "unthoughts" blocking development and no "epistemological rupture" needed to take place. The problems had been physical in nature, not mental.

The problem with screws was that no one had yet figured out how to repeatedly and accurately make the damn things and not that no one thought of screws yet.

Then, once Maudslay showed the world how it could be done, interchangeable machined parts began being made in increasing numbers. When enough parts were being made on a routine basis for certain uses, enough extra parts were floating around to allow people from all over begin tinkering with those parts and finding all sorts of other and different ways to use them. Again, no mental blocks, just physical ones.

The process of progress is prosaic, pedestrian, and pragmatic. Mysticism need not apply because mysticism isn't real. There's no "spark" event magically leading to other simultaneous developments. Each advance simply means that there's simply more pieces to play with and, the more basic or fundamental an advance the, more it can used with the other pieces. Throw enough "building blocks" out there and Homo sapiens tinkerer is going to find more useful combinations of those "building blocks". No gesalt changes or paradigm shifts need apply, the only obstructions are purely material and do not exist in our minds.


Bill
 
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