history of Recordings and recording—Page 4

Mathew Brady upon his return from the battle of Bull Run. According to historians, he was not present during combat.

the pace of change

Until relatively recently, improvements in recordings and recording have come slowly and laboriously. Writing began in the third millennium BCE but it was not until the advent of the Gutenberg press that mass distribution of the written word became practical. The four-hundred-odd-years that have ensued since the invention of Gutenberg's press in the 15th century have seen many refinements and improvements to printing technology but nothing else happened in the various fields of recording technology that was equally as revolutionary as the original circa 1439 invention until 1827, when French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the first successful practical photograph. Soon after, practical sound recording was invented, in 1877.

To the 21st century mind, photographic and sound recording may seem to have occurred in the far, far distant past because several generations have been born to them and take them for granted. No so, when measured by the time scale of Gutenberg's press. Even though photography began with Niépce and recorded sound with Edison, measured by the history of writing, recorded sound and photography are comparatively recent events, considering that mankind had written for over five thousand years and had played music for well over ten thousand years before it was able to record pictures or playback sound.

Many people living today fail to realize that photography and sound reproduction go back as far as they actually do because, for practical purposes, they began only in the last half of the 20th century. It took decades of development after their invention before either of these technologies advanced to the point where it became practical enough to pass into common use. Sadly, only in the mid-to-late 20th century did many of these early pictorial and sound recordings become commercially available to mass media and the public, and many original recordings are still being unearthed.

the advent of photography

the first practical photograph ever made. Exposed by Niépce, its inventor, in 1827

Niépce, the inventor of photography, is shown below at the left; his first photograph is shown at the right. The technology Niépce developed is crude, but this is to be expected.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, inventor of the first practical photograph, in 1827

Niépce took the first photograph in the world out of his workroom window. In it, one can just make out a few buildings with a tree in the distance. For comparison, a sketch of the same scene drawn in 1952 is shown below. The two are remarkably similar and there is more detail in the photo. Not bad for an exposure made in 1827!

A pencil sketch of the scene in the photo at the right made 125 years after the original 1827 photo was taken. See if you can make out the objects in the photo using the sketch as a guide.

Progress was slow. It wasn't until the start of the American Civil War in the early 1860s, thirty years after the invention of photography, that Mathew Brady first began to display and sell his employee's daguerreotypes of the war's carnage in his New York photography studio. These vivid pioneering photos, taken on both sides of battlefield principally by Scottish photographer Alexander Gardener, his brother, and his associates James Gibson and the brilliant Timothy O'Sullivan, revealed for the first time in history the reality, brutality, and destruction of war.

the development of phtography had a huge impact on society. The photos by Gardener and his associates who worked for Brady forever put an end to the previously romanticized notion that war could be glorious; they brought photography to the public's attention and changed its attitude toward military conflict; never again would citizens of the world be blinded to the true cost of war.

the inestimable Alexander Gardener

Gardener's famous picture of a dead Confederate sniper. Gardener staged this photo to tell a story, a practice not considered ethical today but still followed by sensational press phtographers.

they also established many of today's ethical conventions for news reporting. They virtually wrote the rules for what subjects to photograph; how to graphically compose, light, and dramatize subjects; and how to effectively convey information through the camera eye.

Gardener also was Lincoln's favorite photographer, and his portraits of Lincoln both before and after the latter's assassination are the most famous and important ones we have.

the advent of Sound

As with photography, the French were the first to invent sound recording. In 1857, a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented a device which he called the phonautograph that could transcribe sound. It worked by using a pig bristle to trace a line that represented sound on a visual glass place coated with lampblack or on a paper roll.

Crude though this technology seems, the recordings the device made eventually proved to be surprisingly faithful. Unfortunately, at the time it was not understood that the waveform recorded by the phonautograph was in fact a recording of a sound wave which, to be heard, only needed a suitable playback mechanism. Even if this had been understood, there was no good way to playback the sound.the phonautograph remained a laboratory curiosity in the field of acoustics, where it helped researchers determine the frequency of musical pitches and analyze sound and speech.

In 2008, phonautograph recordings were for the first time played back as sound by American audio historians. They accessed Scott's phonautograph papers in France's patent office and at the Académie des Sciences and optically scanned the etched paper recordings into a computer program previously developed for this type of task by a team of physicists. The sound waves on the paper were then translated by a computer into audible sounds.

One recording of a song recorded in 1860 proved to be a copy of the French folk song Au Clair de la Lune. Later research suggested that this recording was actually made by the voice of the phonautograph inventor himself.

• Explore the story of the phonautograph at the Wikipedia web site page called Phonautograph. Hear the original, unenhanced recording of Scott's voice as it sounds when played on modern audio equipment: click here.

Not only was the original 1860 recording of Scott's voice captured and digitally transcribed for playback on modern sound reproducing equipment, it also was enhanced and restored in a manner comparable to the way an old LP or shellac recording is remastered.

• Listen to the original 1860 Scott recording as it sounds when played on a modern playback system. Next, hear and compare a remastered version of the same recording (Thank you YouTube): click here.

(Note: the voice may be elevated in pitch because it was recorded at twice normal speed.)

Thomas Edison in his laboratory in 1887, the year he invented the phonograph

Thomas Edison is credited with the invention of the first practical sound recording device that could also play back what it recorded. He called it the phonograph. The story of the phonograph is a typical Edison success story.

Edison's (and the world's) first phonographic sound recorder, invented 1877

Edison was the kind of inventor who only interested himself in an idea after he could see a way to turn it into cash. His original goal was relatively modest; at first he only sought to record telephone messages, which, before the advent of the phonograph were ephemeral because upon receipt they passed into thin air and were lost at the receiver's ear.

Whence Edison's interest? the telephone was a terrific advance, but it could only transmit information; it couldn't record it. That meant that important news, like stock quotations, price offerings, purchase orders, election results, and births and deaths, could be captured at the source and transmitted but couldn't be preserved on a recording that later could be played back. With a product like the phonograph, it would have been possible to record sound coming from a telephone earpiece and eliminate this shortfall.

Today we know that the market for telephone recording devices is limited. Had Edison stuck to his original idea, he would not have made much money. But the Wizard of Menlo Park quickly saw that the profit-making potential of the market for music and speech recording far exceeded the market for recording telephone messages, and it wasn't long after Edison invented the first practical phonograph in 1877 that sound recordings began to be sold to the general public.

In 1877 Edison, shown in his lab at the right, above, spoke the words "Mary had a little lamb" into a huge acoustic diaphragm attached to an outlandish machine that turned a tinfoil cylinder under a stylus, and the rest is history (that is, modern history).

• Hear Edison in his own voice repeat the famous words he spoke into his original phonographic device in 1877 (Thank you YouTube). The recording you hear was made on a later-model phonograph, not his original 1877 model: click here.
• For a detailed account of the events surrounding Edison's invention and his role in the history of recording, visit Electricka's page called Recordings And Recording—An Historic Account: click here.

Media integration

Eventually, still pictures became moving pictures and silent movies became talkies. It was exactly a century after Niépce's invention that sound and pictures began to merge.

the 1927 movie, the Jazz Singer, is widely accepted at the first commercially viable sound movie. Six fundamental advances in sound and photography were necessary to make this movie practical: 1) still pictures, 2) moving images, 3) projection of moving images on a large screen, 4) sound recording, 5) electronic sound amplification, and 6) sound-on-film recording. Once these advances were in place, sound could be combined with moving images and presented before a large audience. The merger of sound with film had could be accomplished in a way that could foster the arts as never before.

Seen from one point of view, this merger is perhaps the most momentous development in art history. Never before had it been possible to combine images and sound in such a way as to imitate life and to metaphorically transport large numbers of people to other worlds. After 1927, movies had the power to immerse an audience in an overpowering multimedia experience. Could an artistic medium be more powerful than this?

the pace quickens

Because of these advances in sound and photographic recording technology, the 19th century proved to be a landmark century, a milestone not only for recording technology but for the arts, as well. Progress in the arts advanced more rapidly because of these inventions. They opened the door to an explosion in the arts and led to the development of what was to become what is arguably the most important cultural advance in modern times—the sound movie.

A lot of water flowed over the proverbial dam during the time between the invention of writing in Sumer and Gutenberg's invention of printing. During these early years mankind made slow but significant progress in recording. More water flowed in the 400 years that passed between Gutenberg and the first photo and the first phonograph. After that, it took only about fifty years before sound and visual recording and playback became practical.

Notice how the intervals between major recording advances get shorter as time passes. The 19th century marks the historical moment when intervals between recording advances began to shorten appreciably and advances in recording technology began to snowball.

Edison's first phonograph was was a crude device that "wrote" sound on tin foil wrapped around a cylinder, but soon it developed into a modern miracle. The photograph, too, evolved quickly until now it is a boon to mankind. Today sound recordings and photographs carry information, inspire, entertain, educate, support research, and do a host of other jobs upon which modern society depends.

the inventions of sound recording and photography are significant in themselves because they mark the time when mankind first became able to record sound and photographs. They are also significant because they mark a sea change in mankind's ability to manage his artistic and creative environment by means of deliberate and focused technological innovation.

Advancing recording technology wasn't easy. When Sumerians developed writing, they only needed to master the art of scratching symbols on clay tablets with a stylus; their greatest challenge was developing the cuneiform writing system. But when Edison and Niépce respectively invented sound recording and photography, they first had to have a vision of what they wanted to accomplish; then they had to gain insight into the workings of nature and deliberately increase their ability to manipulate a fledgling technology; finally, they had to deliberately set out to develop something new, complex, and radically different.

Advancing recording technology wasn't easy, but it was vital; the slow pace of technological advancement characteristic of past centuries has cost society dearly. If Niépce had invented photography only fifty years earlier (at age 15, still in his lifetime) a French Mathew Brady might have been taking battlefield pictures of Napoleon and his Grand Army. Imagine how many lives could have been saved if military history had been changed for the better as a result!

Beethoven died in 1827, exactly fifty years before Edison made his first recording. By all accounts, he was a masterful, innovative, legendary pianist. If sound recording had been invented only fifty years earlier, Beethoven's performances could have been captured on records. What a loss that they were not!

If only fifty years could have made so much of a difference, imagine the things, people, performances, and scenes that might be extant today if sound or film recording had been invented 100 or 1,000 years earlier!

Not all the great performers and performances have been lost to posterity, however. Thanks to Edison's inventive spirit, incredibly a residue of recorded musical and other performances dating from the turn of the 19th century have been captured. Musicians like Paderewski, Caruso, Sarasate, and Ysae can still be heard today. In many cases, these performances are brilliant, even unparalleled, despite the fact that the performers made them in the twilight of their years.

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...Coming.

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