In the eighteenth century, a new literary form emerged in England and spread to Europe and the United States. The novel, a product of middle-class sensibilities and mo- rality, put fictional characters through a com- plex of events within a recognizable social setting. The key element in an English novel was the gain or loss of social status, a topic that preyed on the minds of the middle class readers. From its beginnings until the twen- tieth century, the novel was typically domi- nated by class consciousness. Themes that raised social problems or personal foibles resonated with readers.
Popular fiction writers like Charles Dick- ens serialized their novels in weekly newspa- pers and magazines before they appeared between hard covers. To keep the readers buying magazines, writers ended chapters on a note of suspense. At home, families read these serialized novels aloud as a form of entertainment.
Along the way came the discovery of a public appetite for novels that were easy to read, did not tax the brain, and were filled with action, adventure, and romance. Charac- ters, absolutely evil or purely good, were simi- lar from book to book. Outcomes were predictable. The very predictability of the
stories was one of their most desired features.
Purists may sniff at what they term trash, but it certainly sells.
Continuous web papermaking machines and large cylinder presses plus lower quality paper allowed weekly newspapers in the 1840s to print novels cheaply, first by serial- izing them and then by printing entire novels in newspaper format. The printing technol- ogy and new binding methods, with cloth covers in place of leather, also reduced the prices of hard-cover books. These changes put books into the hands of people who otherwise could not afford them.
In 1875, the dime novel was born in a Chi- cago publishing house, Donnelley, Lloyd & Co.
Other publishers quickly followed. Printed on rough paper with a brightly illustrated cover, dime novels were soon being turned out at the rate of one a day, and obviously were snapped up just as fast. Longer novels sold for 15 to 20 cents, but plenty were available for 10 cents.
The novels were issued with the imprint of a series or library just like the paperback west- erns, detective stories, and romance novels of today, which are direct descendants of the dime novel.
As usual, technologies changed. Tastes did not.
ENTERTAINMENT 107
Entertainment on a Plate
Every nation, every tribe has made its own music. Their melodies, their songs, the mu- sical instruments they have fashioned lie at the very root of their culture. That the music comes from the soul of the people has mattered more than brilliant perform- ance. Friends, family, and neighbors enter- tain one another oblivious to ragged singing and uncertain fingering.
Today, the technology that brings the genius of Mozart and the latest pop song pouring into our ears has deformed the universal characteristic of playing the mu- sic that we make ourselves. Unlike the time of our great grandparents, the custom of singing or reading to one another is more the exception than the rule. Why try to harmonize when the Supremes do it so much better and we can hear them with such clarity? We do not pause to consider that an unintended consequence of listen- ing to Barbra Streisand instead of our sister is the loss of a bit of family closeness. A century ago someone remarked:
The home wears a vanishing aspect. Public amusements increase in splendor and fre- quency, but private joys grow rare and diffi- cult, and even the capacity for them seems to be withering.'
Even so, few among us would choose that way of life when we have available music of a quality beyond imagining a century ago. Admittedly, the old-fashioned pleas- ures have not been totally abandoned. Bat- tered pianos and guitars are still around.
The karaoke and the electronic keyboard are plugged in at parties.
Along with its sister invention, the tele- phone, the phonograph—for the first time since humans began to speak— extended the sound of the voice beyond the distance someone could shout. Now there could be preserved not only a famous person's thoughts as written, but the flavor of per- sonality in the style and nuance of speech.
Voices and actions important in the history of the twentieth century were captured on disk and tape. Recorded sound is, of course,
also what we hear at the movies and in television news reports.
More than a century ago the phono- graph, in McLuhan's phrase, broke down the walls of the music halls The phono- graph was the first means to bring non- print professional entertainment into the home, an entertainment machine that, like the piano, was destined to be encased as a piece of furniture to civilize it for the par- lor. A generation later another entertain- ment machine, the radio, would follow it there, also disguised as furniture. Another generation would introduce still another, the television set. These machines of steel, plastic, and glass bring into the home en- tertainment created somewhere else.
When stereo reached a peak of popularity, people who could afford the most expen- sive pieces preferred their equipment to look like the machines they were. Less expensive stereo systems were combined as furniture items.
The Start of Recorded Music
In 1807, an Englishman, Thomas Young, picked up sound vibrations with a stylus that traced their amplitude on a smoke- blackened cylinder. A Frenchman, Leon Scott, went one step further in 1857 with a phonautograph that captured vocal sounds with the same type of stylus apparatus.
French poet and inventor Charles Cros de- signed, but did not build, a voice-reproduc- ing device. Cros envisioned a machine that would reproduce conversation visibly so the deaf could read it. In the same year, 1877, that Cros, too poor to afford a pat- ent, left his idea in a two-page document in a sealed envelope at the Academie des Sciences in Paris, an American, Thomas Edison, actually built a machine.' It is of at least passing interest that the two inven- tors, Cros and Edison, designed a voice recording machine one year after two other inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, designed (and patented on the same day) a voice transmitting machine.
108 A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
Edison, interested in speeding up the rate of information transfer of telegraph messages, got the idea for recording sound as he listened to the irregular whine of a telegraph disk revolving at high speed.10 He was using an apparatus he had invented for recording dots and dashes, which included a revolving disk on which he put a piece of paper covered with paraffin wax. One day he noticed that when the disk revolved at a certain speed it sounded a musical note. As an experiment, he put a fresh piece of paper in the machine and as it was going through, he shouted, "Wh00000." When he sent the paper back through, he faintly heard his own voice. Edison himself de- scribed what happened next:
I had built a toy which included a funnel (and a diaphragm)... A string... was con- nected to a little cardboard figure of a man sawing wood. When someone sang "Mary had a little lamb" into the funnel, the little man started sawing. I thus reached the con- clusion that if I could find a way of record- ing the movements of the diaphragm I could make the recorder reproduce the original movements imparted to the dia- phragm by the person singing, and thus reproduce the human voice.11
Edison kept at it. His first test was of the words, "Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow." Those are the first words ever recorded.
Nothing Ever Like It
Edison improved the phonograph and gave some demonstrations but, recognizing the commercial limitations of tinfoil recording with its scratching and hissing that made the recording all but inaudible, he set it aside to work on another invention, the electric light, which he invented two years later.' In granting Edison a patent in 1877 for a speaking machine, the U.S. Patent Office found no previous evidence of any- thing resembling his invention, an unusual situation in patent history.
The development of hard wax-covered cylinders rekindled Edison's interest a dec- ade later. After studying the market, he
concluded that a talking machine could aid dictation. It could record books for the blind. There could be coin-in-the-slot pho- nographs.13 He imagined a talking doll, toys, and music boxes. The phonograph could preserve the last words of dying fam- ily members. Also, people who did not own one of Alexander Graham Bell's new tele- phones could record a message in their own voice, then take it to a telephone trans- mitting station. More presciently, he fore- saw it as a record keeper, a preserver of speech, and as a source of music, although, growing deaf, the inventor did not at first think the public would be much interested in recorded music.
By this time, Alexander Graham Bell and his associates had produced a better talking machine, which they called the Grapho- phone. The competition was intense as Edison during 1887 and 1888 took out 33 patents for improvements to his phono- graph.14
Edison also created a new type of micro- phone to change air vibration into electri- cal vibration. A cylinder phonograph converted the vibrations into scratches as a permanent record, but at this point the phonograph was a technology in search of something commercially worthwhile to do.
The next year, 1878, two stenographers to the Supreme Court agreed that the pho- nograph could be used as a dictating tool.
They got a license from Edison to sell the gadget in Maryland and the District of Co- lumbia. However, its limitation of a half minute of scratchy sound rendered it use- less as a business tool. Lecturers who took phonographs on lyceum circuits were equally disappointed once the novelty wore off for audiences. The stenographers named their new company the Columbia Phonograph Company. It would eventually mutate into CBS, the Columbia Broadcast- ing System.
Something more exciting awaited the phonograph as the centenary of the French Revolution was celebrated in Paris with a great exhibition. Gustav Eiffel's tower sym- bolized progress and technology. Edison crossed the Atlantic with his best inven- tions, including the electric light and the
ENTERTAINMENT 109 telephone, to which he had contributed a
great deal. For the phonograph, he set up listening booths. It caused a sensation:
The public queued eagerly at the listening booths. The phonographs stood on tables, with an attendant to change the cylinders, and rubber tubes with earpieces led to lis- tening booths around each table. People awaiting their turn looked in astonishment at listeners' faces, unable to explain the rapt expressions and sudden outbursts of mirth.15
Phonograph Parlors
The first significant cash rewards came from nickel-in-the-slot and penny-in-the- slot automatic phonograph parlors that sprang up in stores all over the nation. That set in motion the first demand for phono- graph recordings. Marching band music was the most popular. Patrons also parted with their nickels to hear singers, whistlers, instrument soloists, and talking records, including dialect humor. The first phono- graph parlors, well lit and decorated with potted palms and rugs on the floor, invited passersby with free admission. The current selections were listed. Entire families or young women need suffer no embarrass- ment by entering a phonograph parlor.
Couples shared listening tubes.
Having found a use, development of the technology proceeded. Tinfoil produced poor sound. Bell and his associates devel- oped wax-coated cylinders that gave better sound, although still a long way from the high fidelity today's audiophile has come to expect. Bell also added a speed governor to the machine, so that the cylinder turned at a constant speed regardless of the cranking speed. Listening tubes gave way to horns, with those for lecture halls measuring sev- eral feet in diameter at the mouth. Edison provided hundreds of improvements, pat- enting everything as he and his assistants introduced them and, as usual, ready to sue over any infringements.'6
Bell's American Graphophone Company prospered in the home market with a sim- ple cylinder phonograph that sold for $10.
At the turn of the century, Edison was
selling a cylinder player for the home at about $20, but his biggest market remained the phonograph parlor, Columbia adver- tised machines for home recording with the slogan, "That Baby's Voice in a Columbia Record." Like audio tape and video tape today, the home recording feature proved attractive, but not nearly so much as the chance to play recordings of popular pro- fessional performers. The practice of lis- tening to canned music in preference to home-made had begun.
Emile Berliner, who had invented a mi- crophone and contributed to Bell's tele- phone apparatus, added three innovations.
For a better recording medium, he substi- tuted a coating of fat for wax, side-to-side tracking instead of up and down "hill and dale" tracking, and the most important, re- cording on a disk instead of a cylinder. But the flat zinc disk that he produced was not to be sold to the public. Rather it was used like a waffle iron, as a master to stamp out records in flat circles. Easy to manufacture, records would be sold cheap. Berliner, the immigrant son of a German, Jewish Talmu- dic scholar, had found a way to make Edison's brilliant invention available to everyone.
The Phonograph as Furniture
To improve his screechy hand-cranked ma- chine, Berliner took it to the New Jersey machine shop of Eldridge Johnson, who became so fascinated with it that he got into the business himself, founding the Victor Talking Machine Company. Johnson de- scribed how he got into the business:
During the model-making days of the busi- ness one of the very early types of talking machines was brought to the shop for altera- tions. The little instrument was badly designed. It sounded much like a partially- educated parrot with a sore throat and a cold in the head, but the little wheezy in- strument caught my attention and held it fast and hard. I became interested in it as I have never been interested before in any- thing.17
110 A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
where he died without ever having lis- tened to a recording.
Dancing and Jazz
About the time of the first World War, the recordings, especially from Victor and Co- lumbia, helped to create a new social phe- nomenon, the dance craze. It was the day of the one-step, the turkey trot, and the tango. It was also the start of jazz. At the same time, a little concern was felt about the accelerated pace of national and cul- tural development.18 For some people, things were changing much too fast.
Meanwhile, Edison kept manufacturing and selling cylinders by the millions until the Depression of the 1930s. Yielding to popular demand, his company turned out flat records as well. For the most part, he stayed away from opera and the classics.
Edison sold what he called cracker barrel music for the enjoyment of common folks.
Yet, his recordings boasted superior qual- ity, thanks in part to the plastic his cylin- ders were made of and thanks in part to his diamond-tip styluses, which were better than the metal tip and wooden tip styluses used on disks. Volume from speakers was controlled physically by a handle that pushed a cotton ball into the throat of a speaker or by closing the doors in front of the speaker. Despite having become deaf, Edison continued his interest in talking machines until shortly before he died at 84.
The highly profitable recorded music in- dustry attracted a lot of competitors in Europe and America. The Pathe brothers, Charles and Emile, made a fortune manu- facturing phonographs and records, but they are more famous for their contribu- tions to cinematography. Gianni Bettini of Italy and Henri Lioret of France manufac- tured both the machines and the record- ings. Lioret built them inside dolls just as Edison had envisioned and long before the first little girl would hug a Chatty Cathy.
Imaginations soared to novelties beyond talking dolls, whose success awaited the microchip, and coin-operated phono- graphs, forerunner of the jukebox. Inex- pensive toy phonographs enjoyed a spate of popularity.
Figure 4.1 A Victor phonograph manufactured early in the twentieth century.
(Courtesy Pavek Museum.) Years of legal battles ensued over patent infringements. Johnson won in the courts.
He had already drastically improved the sound performance of the machine. Now his company began to build the mechanism into a cabinet. From its introduction in 1906, the Victrola made sound recording less of a novelty and more of an instrument of social use. By this time, someone got the idea of putting music on both sides of the record.
In London, a shabby artist turned up at the Gramophone company office. It seems he had painted a picture of his terrier, Nipper, listening to an Edison company machine, but nobody would buy the pic- ture. The artist, Francis Barraud, actually painted Nipper from a photograph; the dog had died four years earlier. Barraud offered the picture to the Gramophone Company.
The office manager liked it, so a deal was struck. The artist painted out the Edison cylinder phonograph and painted in a flat- record Gramophone machine. The result is
"His Master's Voice," probably the most reproduced advertising picture of all time.
The artist earned a decent living painting copies of his original picture. Abrass monu- ment was erected to the dog in the town
ENTERTAINMENT 111
Phonographs were hidden in fake cam- eras, stacks of books, lamp shades, hat boxes, and even a Buddha with a phono- graph concealed in his belly, all hiding the machine.
The Graphophone, the Ronephone, and the Ediphone were early dictating machines.
The Phonopostal produced recordings for mailing like postcards. The Pathdgraphe was an audio-visual device for learning for- eign languages. The Tempophon and the Peter Pan Clock were talking clocks, an obvious predecessor of the radio alarm clock. Augustus Stroh, a German living in London, attached a phonograph diaphragm and horn to a violin in place of its wooden case to produce what people called a phono- fiddle, a turn-of-the-century version of the amplified electric guitar.
High Fidelity
By 1920, vacuum tubes were amplifying voices in public address systems and were beginning to find applications in the re- corded sound industry. The application of electronics to the sound system trans- formed sound technology from a mechani- cal scratchiness to high fidelity. Electrical engineers at AT&T's Bell Labs and General Electric turned their attention to the design of microphone and loudspeaker, recording and playback stylus, pre-amp, and ampli- fier. Where the feeble force of a stylus moved a diaphragm that made the sound, now the stylus movement created a feeble current that was amplified clearly and cleanly. A strong current moved the dia- phragm in the loudspeaker so the master's voice could be reproduced loudly enough to damage Nipper's hearing. Stereo, devel- oped by Bell Labs in 1933, was demon- strated to the public in 1940 through the soundtrack of Walt Disney's Fantasia.
The "Automatic Phonograph Parlor" was reborn with the jukebox in the 1930s. By 1940, a quarter of a million neon-lit juke- boxes were in bars and restaurants. People were still willing to pay a nickel to hear a tune, but recorded music was taking on a new role where it was less the center of attention. The jukebox song was a drinking
Figure 4.2 A 1934 Wurlitzer jukebox offered ten selections. (Courtesy Pavek Museum.)
companion, a background to conversation, and the rhythm for a dance.
Muzak's soothing tones accompanied us while shopping, riding elevators, and work- ing. It has been appreciated, ignored, or derided by people who felt trapped and forced to listen. Muzak staff members rear- ranged popular songs to eliminate any pas- sages that might attract attention, leaving only a neutral, pastel environment that is more soothing than silence, which can be perceived as hostile and threatening. Cows reportedly gave more milk and chickens laid more eggs when soothed by music.
And, of course, credit cards danced out of wallets.
Although we no longer hear our own music as often as we did, the music is of our own choosing. For hundreds of years, human- kind dreamed of capturing and then releas- ing, the human voice, but no technical means of doing so existed. It was not until the nine- teenth century that the dream came true.
No longer would the direction of music be limited to the choices of wealthy patrons of the arts. By buying the records it fancied, the mass public would decide the direction that music took. Without the phonograph record, jazz would not have sent its notes across America and then around the world.
Nor would swing, nor rock 'n' roll, nor country, nor rap. The phonograph brought democracy to music. It is the real meaning of going gold or platinum.