WI: The phonograph is invented earlier?

WI: The phonograph is invented in the Middle Ages or Roman times.?



Let's say during in the High Middle Ages or Roman times a child runs a stick over the bumps on a wall and listens to the noise and thinks 'what if I could arrange the bumps to make a certain noise?' Sixty years of obsessive compulsive pursuit later and you have a cylinder that can record sound.



What effect would this have?



A few great performers, leaders get recorded? Imagine listening to Julius Caesar orate his Gallic Wars.



Songs and speeches get reduced to 3 minutes?



You can study what a language actually sounded like from hundreds of years ago?



Language becomes codified quicker? A standardized unchanging elite or common language that you can listen to Cicero himself property conjugate and pronounce correctly.



When the telegraph is developed the primary impetus is to marry it to the phonograph?



The actual indisputable words of religious leaders? “and you will receive 70 refreshing grapes...” Of course this could go the other way: “What did he say?” “Blessed are the Cheese makers!” And then there is the whole how do you know the record is really...?
 
It would be a novelty for the wealthy, since the equipment requires very fine manufacturing techniques and be correspondingly expensive, all for the sake of playback quality that the Late Victorian era would be appaled at. But they would record music with it, which as in the old days, means getting your singer/band to record the same thing over and over since you can't make copies of the record. And probably short speeches too, although it wouldn't be anything important. Snippets to store in a library, maybe.
 
I read up a little on Edison's invention and a couple runners-up, and it seems to me unlikely that anyone before an 1800 level of general scientific and engineering development would stumble upon a mechanical means of both recording and replicating sound.

I believe the kind of sounds one gets rubbing sticks along various surfaces are categorized as "stridulations," and perhaps a kind of sonic writing or printing might be developed, sort of analogous to a player piano, whereby strips of metal or tablets of ceramic or some such means can play scripted sound sequences, as a kind of music. This is entirely different from making a devise that can record sound in reproduceable form on some medium.

Edison himself was led to the project of making direct audio recordings via the process of developing means of recording and then replaying telegraphic signals. So actually in his case the telegraph and telephone were necessary precursor tech. Now other people than Edison had a different mental path leading perhaps toward a comparable system had he not preempted them. But in all cases the concept of sound as a kind of wave was preexisting.

Then, assuming that some philosopher in a world considerably less advanced in general science and tech than say 1820 OTL just stumbles for personal reasons on the wild notion sound is a kind of wave, would they require the level of analysis the most advanced scientists and mathematicians of the late 17th century brought to bear on it? Or is the merely intuitive notion of a rise and fall of some not too well defined quantity they might or might not realize was air pressure sufficient? One thing we should bear in mind when we visualize sound as a wave on a graph of some kind is the concept of constant flow of time faithfully reproduced. It is one thing to have a general picture of sound as waves and another to successfully reproduce sound by faithfully recording the rate of change of pressure at any instant. Theory need not be too esoteric if one has a means of recording on a medium that faithfully maintains a constant relationship between the pressure level recorded and the passage of time. So--at a minimum we need for the recording machinery to be advancing along a medium at a constant rate, or anyway if it changes, for the change to be reproducible. We therefore need pretty sophisticated mechanical engineering, to guarantee that the rate at which say a needle cuts into wax along some track to record the sound is constant, and that playback happens at the same rate.

Then, assuming for the moment that someone comes out of the woodwork bearing the Antikythera device and says hah, complex gear work was well known and precision made in the Hellenic age already, I would say yes, clearly a few very fine craftsworkers, presumably affiliated with some temple or library under the patronage of a handful of very great kings or tyrants could achieve it for obscure purposes, but then note that such precision vanished from the European world until the 14th century developments of various clock works. But the crucial thing here is, turning or advancing a bar or something like that at a precise rate, and I think for that true clockwork in the sense of actual timekeeping devices--such as the springs inside a mechanical watch, or the pendulum, are needed to regulate the rate of motion. Was that kind of knowlege and craft available in the Classical era?

Meanwhile while some sort of clocklike escapement mechanism strictly and reproducibly regulating the rate of advancement on a recording medium must exist, so too must a suitable recording medium. The OP seems to assume that suitably perfectly round cylinders, and suitable forms of wax to coat them uniformly in, or sheets of tinfoil (which Edison first used) are just lying around waiting for some inventor to order them combined into suitable phonographic cylinders. What is the warrant for that?

That is exactly the difference between an inventor in the Hellenistic age and one in the age of the Industrial Revolution; in the former, only a very few great centers of learning under the patronage of a very few mighty and rich kings would have a great many oddities of strange goods from around the known world stockpiled there, and armies of more or less skilled craftsmen to be ordered to make things at the whim of some philosopher. Whereas in the early 19th century, after several centuries development of preferential access to global markets, European developed cities tied into these global trades would display a range of curiosities grander than any great Hellenistic tyrant replicated in thousands of dusty, musty obscure little shops. I suggest that to get an invention, it is not enough to have a few dozen instances of the predecessor tech lying around in some region as vast as say the Mediterranean. We need a certain critical density of availability of necessary elements for a combination of them into a new invention.

Therefore I think it stretches probability to have an invention of a phonograph earlier than the era in which clockwork became common in Europe, and then the invention must focus on the problems of how to get a predictably uniform batch of some recording medium mounted on a suitable device. Very easy to do the latter in the mid-19th century, much harder some 2000 years before.
 
Shevek23,

The thrust of the OP is what difference would it make if it had been. Which apart from my initial musings I don't see much.

I grant the likelihood of invention low for all reasons sighted but I point out your vision seems to be of a self regulated play back as opposed to manually hand cranked one. In addition Edison was preempted by a few different Frenchmen for the theory of sound reproduction in part or whole.

Your argument sounds similar to a few examples of anti-technologic development or the losing of higher technology inventions when the situation is just not conductive to their preservation (the bow & arrow in Australia, Deep sea going among the Easter Islanders, gun powder among the Japanese, possibly movable type with the Phiastos Disc).
 
The constant drive mechanism would be secondary. The wrong speed changes the pitch, but the sound can still be intelligible. Given the situations described, such a device might come along in Renaissance times, but without the telegraph and/or telephone, who would think of it?
 
I meant to suggest that the very attempt to develop a mechanical recording of sound requires a theoretical concept of sound as a wave, and that visualization is partially dependent on the concept of uniformly flowing time, which allows one to speak of things like frequency and wavelength. It might be good enough if the concept is kind of vague and impressionistic, but the notion that the motion of the parts must be regulated so that a given distance in space on the recording corresponds to a certain amount of time for the sound to vibrate in is pretty essential to the concept.

Therefore I would think that until some means of demonstrating the regular partition of time in uniform units via some sort of simple harmonic oscillator escapement mechanism is achieved in reality, the very concept of a phonograph might be off the table.

And yes, of course the major power source will be hand cranking, and a simple playback system might leave the job of regulating the rate of playback to the operator, who will judge by the sound if they are cranking too fast or too slow. But if in addition to the playback depending waywardly on a human hand's cranking steadiness, recording is also at fluctuating speeds, it will become quite an art to get decent fidelity in the recordings. Reproduction of a master recording onto multiple copies might not suffer from an additional variation since fluctuations there will cancel out as it were, but I think varying base speeds will have a bearing on the depth of penetration of needles into the medium since impact force relates to speed--this variable will also have a bearing in the initial recording of course. All in all, having a regulated rate of turn seems pretty crucial to me in initial recording and in reproduction, if not necessarily in playback. If you can make some kind of escapement mechanism that can buffer fluctuating human provided cranking torque, presumably via means of springs, it might be excessively expensive to purchase that for playback, but still the technology will depend on being able to do that at the front end of recording and the intermediate process of reproduction, and so will the concept showing the way to the invention in the first place.

Then there are issues of quality control, getting wax or soft metal of a predictable grade uniformly wrapped around cylinders of near enough to perfect roundness, standardizing sizes, stuff like that. I think maybe some Hellenistic temple-library under a grand patron such as one of the Diadochi might conceivably do it, and maintain the records in-house, but it would require a very low probability leap of insight and be pretty "high maintenance" thus liable to be lost with political fluctuations of fortune--maybe the cylinders and some mechanisms are captured, but a lot of staff would have to be brought along to enable the new patrons to know what sort of specialized tasks to set technicians to perform, and secrets are likely to be lost completely, turning the cylinders into irreproducible curiosities and then as things break down (and the cylinders themselves must suffer wear with each use after all) broken and soon abandoned, or kept as dead relics. Hopefully the survival of the legend, perhaps with some worn down or broken items to back up the credibility of the story, might inspire future reinvention far earlier than probable as a totally new concept.

Maybe in late Renaissance an inspired DaVinci type of person might be able to piece it together, especially if legends from antiquity inspire them, more likely a century or two later when Early Modern science and global scale trade networks bring resources together in places like the Netherlands. This is only a handful of centuries earlier than OTL, and I think any invention before 1700 is very low probability, and even in the 18th century the probability is still low. The relative wealth of the 19th century as much as the further development and dissemination of mechanical skills and improving standards of precision seemed as important to me as the basic concept, which requires a "mechanical universe" concept not prevalent until the rising machine era made Newtonian thought more popular.

So a TL based on some Hellenistic genius patronized by a suitably powerful king or other wealthy regime with access to resources from far flung sources would have to be most carefully written to even be plausibly possible and will not be probable at all--not ASB type improbable, but a hell of an ask.

Given that the OP has made the ask, I suppose the cultural impacts could be more widespread than a mere curiosity, if the technology manages to be replicated in many centers so that its survival becomes more probable. This is a second low probability event to be sure, but say the Library of Alexandria is a major center of phonographic reproduction, and the Romans can conquer it without sacking it. I would think the Ptolemies would use the technology to issue orders to various agents, to be played back in the presence of local notables so all present know the true orders of the king, recognizing his voice. It would be a good way to verify documents like wills and so forth. The Roman Emperors then would have the technology replicated in Rome and later Imperial capitals, as would various regional governmental centers. Eventually religions would take to recording the authoritative rulings of their leaders and playing them back on solemn occasions to remind the congregations, or select leaders among them, of the authenticity of their hierarchies.

This ability might still be lost to major swathes of territory in various Dark Ages, but by and large someone seems likely to preserve it and replicate a multiplicity of production/reproduction sectors. I could imagine a scenario wherein various combinations of secular and religious authorities decide it is impious or a vehicle of fraud and undertake to ban it--any place that does that before the early modern age seems likely to succeed to me, as the recordings would be fragile against deliberate destruction and the recording/reproduction tech would be far more so.

Also, again until the modern age I would not imagine there would be much opportunity for amplification of the weak sound that could be generated by directly vibrating a diaphragm with the cylinder-needle set up. Electrical tech seems essential for that, though I suppose there might be ingenious non-electrical methods. Such methods however seem quite likely to distort the output sound a whole lot. So the utility of recorded voice would mainly be on a small scale, and likely restricted to elites in practice, making banning of it by religious movements seem more likely to me.
 
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