
At The Dawn Of Recorded Sound, No One Cared - collapse
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/05/22/529550254/at-the-dawn-of-recorded-sound-no-one-cared
======
WalterBright
> He beat the more well-known inventor Thomas Edison by 20 years,

de Martinville was forgotten because his device had no use, could not play
back sound, he did nothing to improve it and he had little idea what to do
with it.

> There is no evidence that shows Edison knew about Scott's breakthrough when
> he stumbled onto sound recording.

He did not "stumble" into it. Edison had a flash of inspiration and then
designed a machine to implement it.

~~~
hammock
>de Martinville was forgotten because his device had no use, could not play
back sound, he did nothing to improve it and he had little idea what to do
with it

So it's like a seismograph for sound? Makes me wonder if there is a
seismograph somewhere that can play back recordings :)

~~~
elliotec
Of course there are... can't all of them do that?

~~~
mirimir
I think that parent meant "recreate recorded earthquakes" ;)

------
graphitezepp
The notion of not knowing why recording sound could be useful to me is hard to
grasp as someone who has always been around it. It is extremely difficult to
understand societies of the past.

~~~
digi_owl
Well keep in mind that most places had some kind of live musical venue.

I seem to recall that when the early recording studios were opened, musicians
were not interested. This because they considered themselves entertainers, not
assembly line workers.

And frankly i find that the best musicians are those that focus on the stage
first and foremost even today. Those that gets remembered most fondly are
those that can get up on stage and actually adapt to and interact with the
audience rather than just go through a routine and bow out.

Never mind that early on the equipment was sensitive and fiddly. The Edison
design involved either paper or solid cylinders wrapped around a rotating
shaft. And the output was a mechanically driven membrane attached to a
bullhorn.

The vacuum tube, and thus the amplifier, didn't show up for another 30 years.

~~~
cr0sh
Technically, Edison invented the vacuum tube - he just didn't completely
understand it or its usefulness entirely.

That's why what was later termed "thermionic emission":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermionic_emission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermionic_emission)

...is also known as the "Edison Effect" (though the effect was discovered by
others much earlier, and re-discovered over time - Edison being just one in
the chain).

His whole purpose was in trying to find out why his light bulbs filaments
broke and burned out, and why there was darkening near the positive terminal
of the bulb.

I won't go further with this, but I do often wonder if Tesla, while he worked
with Edison, had any contact with this part of Edison's operations? In
everything I've read on both inventors, it would seem like the answer is "no";
Tesla started working for Edison in June of 1884, and Edison took out a patent
on the effect in 1883, and exhibited it in 1884.

The timeline is close, but for some reason Tesla either didn't have contact
with the device, or dismissed it - as far as I can tell, though, it was likely
the former, because I've never read anything from him where he discussed it.

Which is a pity. Had they not had the "breakup" of the century (which resulted
in an insane rivalry ala "War of the Currents") - I am certain that Tesla
would have both seen and understood the usefulness of the work, and would have
been able to scientifically describe its workings most likely. Electronic
technology would have been advanced by almost 30 years or so (whether or not
that would have been a good thing we cannot know).

EDIT: years

~~~
nebabyte
ala -> aka "The War ...

Not sure of the specifics but by context I'm assuming that was the intent.

~~~
pavlov
I think French "à la" was the intent.

~~~
wutbrodo
Yes, and I think the intent of the correction was that "a la" is incorrect and
AKA is correct in context. The rivalry described wasn't "along the lines of"
The War of Currents, it _was_ (also known as) The War of Currents.

------
theprop
Those of you flummoxed by this probably at some point have questioned why
study the immune systems of bacteria (led to the biggest breakthrough of late,
crispr) or number theory (led to all cryptography) or build an app to make
photos disappear or other things that only later become obviously "useful".

~~~
williamscales
You had me until the bit about disappearing photos - that's not an innovation,
anybody who has wanted to has always been able to make photos disappear after
sending. It's a bit of a false equivalence to mention a twist on sending
someone a photo in the same sentence as you mention such great research
efforts as number theory and bacterial immunology.

------
psyc
The interesting issue to me isn't the particulars of this one case. It's that
when you invent something very novel, nobody cares because they can't anchor
it in the scheme of things they already care about. Effectively, they can't
"see" what you've done. Communicating the value of your invention can be very
challenging.

~~~
DaggerDagger
That's basically the Inventor's Curse summed up as well as could ever be.

"The inventor is always cursed to invent something that is just as difficult
to explain as it is to invent."

------
coldtea
We are getting back to that now.

At the saturation limit of recorded sound, few care, and not to the degree it
made it once a major and inescapable cultural force.

Of course back then for a short window (50s to 70s and up to mid-nineties or
so) music was expensive to buy, limited collection (needed mail order for
exotic tastes and of course you could hardly sample them), the top 40 songs
were heard by everyone and anyone because cars just had radio (some novelties
aside), and there were few tv channels, no video, surely no YouTube, no
internet, no social media, no mobile phones, no mobile apps, no (or very
limited and primitive) video games, no VR, no cat videos, no memes, no reality
style celebrities (you could get some gossip, but not 24/7 gossip), no
Twitter, and so on. Popular music stood out as a unique way to have fun,
escape, bond, etc then.

------
obastani
Is going from recording to playback a trivial step? The article doesn't make
this clear, but if this step is nontrivial, then Edison's contribution still
seems like a big deal. The article even seems to imply that the format he
recorded the sound in was not amenable to playback.

------
afterburner
I wonder if the poor quality of the recording made it hard to see how it could
be useful for music.

~~~
fudged71
I'm reminded of 3D printing. The output today is generally shitty but the
progress will lead towards something very important.

Years ago I sent the first "3D fax" across the world. It felt remarkable, but
it didnt pick up any attention.

~~~
ajdlinux
3D printing is a far cooler technology once you ignore the maker-community and
the ridiculous claim that home 3D printing is going to completely
revolutionise life for the majority of the population. Being able to 3D print
a custom-patterned plastic cup is fun and all that, but the real game is stuff
like 3D printing for industrial prototyping, medical applications, and so on.

~~~
wutbrodo
How is the tech cooler when you _remove_ from consideration one of its
potential niches (even if it's a lesser one)? I don't buy the spectacular
claim as expressed above either, but it's not beyond to me to think of how it
could have a non-revolutionary but solid impact for personal consumers' lives
at some point.

~~~
ajdlinux
Hmm, poor choice of words - I don't really mean removing that niche from
consideration, but rather ignoring anyone who thinks that that niche is in
fact the main way 3D printing is going to change the world.

------
AndrewKemendo
_He beat the more well-known inventor Thomas Edison by 20 years, though his
accomplishments were only recognized over the last decade._

Just another example of how being first or early, even in groundbreaking
things, means you will probably not find success.

~~~
accountyaccount
_As strange as it seems, all the French inventor cared about was seeing what
sound looked like._

>Just another example of how being first or early, even in groundbreaking
things, means you will probably not find success.

Well no, in this case the inventor of sound recording just had an entirely
different goal.

~~~
sixothree
And neither he nor anyone exposed to this idea were able to make the
connection to playback ability. I do find that a bit surprising.

~~~
subroutine
Apparently Scott first had to convince people that sound came from vibrations.

> Scott proved that vibrations are truly how sounds came to our ears. But
> Thompson says the scientific community had trouble accepting his
> breakthrough.

So maybe it's not too surprising.

~~~
WalterBright
Any violin/piano player already knew that.

~~~
wutbrodo
I'm skeptical that they knew that vibrating air was what our ears perceived as
sound. If you know a little about the history of science, there are tons of
theories that held up for some time that are no less "ridiculous" to our eyes
than some special medium moving through air that our ears process as sound.
The fact that the _source_ of sound was known to vibrate doesn't exclude this
possibility, and _that's_ what violin/piano players knew about (Sources of
visible light often give off heat, but saying that light and heat are the same
thing is not implied by that).

~~~
WalterBright
See my other reply to this topic, which is directly to your point.

------
maxander
> "A sound separated from a sounding body was just sort of a conceptual leap,"
> she says. "I'm not sure people had the cultural context to invent this
> stuff."

It makes one wonder what currently isn't being invented simply because it
doesn't fit into our conceptual framework. We have a somewhat more rich
framework now than people did in the 19th century, of course, but the number
of things we have to play with- computers, genomes, brain scans, rockets- has
also gotten much larger and more complicated.

~~~
ademarre
> _It makes one wonder what currently isn 't being invented simply because it
> doesn't fit into our conceptual framework._

It's fun to think up thought exercises to try and help break out of our
conceptual framework. On a smaller scale, an approach I've played around with
is taking attributes of existing technologies that have certain things in
common, then diagramming them in different ways and looking for holes.

As a concrete example, let's go back to 2005. You might reason that e-mails
and blog posts are both kinds of written messages, however blogs have an
_open_ audience, while e-mails are sent to specific recipients, so a _closed_
audience. Separately, you might compare e-mails to text messages, and realize
that they are very similar, but one is long form while the other is short
form. You can draw this as a table:

    
    
            | short form | long form |
           -+------------+-----------+
       open |     ???    | blogs     |
           -+------------+-----------|
     closed |  SMS texts | e-mail    |
           -+------------+-----------+
    

Now try to figure out what fits in the missing box (short form, open). It's
Twitter! (Or even better, decentralized micro blogging.)

~~~
Nition
Hey I've got one of those:

    
    
                              | Short-term discussion | Ongoing discussion |
                             -+-----------------------+--------------------+
      Admins create subforums | Digg/Old Reddit       | Forums             |
                             -+-----------------------+--------------------|
       Users create subforums | Reddit                | ???                |
                             -+-----------------------+--------------------+

~~~
ademarre
Stack Overflow?

------
dclowd9901
"Scott proved that vibrations are truly how sounds came to our ears. But
Thompson says the scientific community had trouble accepting his breakthrough"

Wat? How the hell did bell makers think bells worked?

~~~
WalterBright
Yeah, I don't believe that, either. Stringed instruments were commonplace, and
the instrument makers pretty obviously knew how they worked.

~~~
MBCook
Just guessing (I'd love to know the real reason):

Just because we know the object vibrates when making sound doesn't mean we
know that sound travels through the air as a bunch of vibrations. Or that are
ear is picking up vibrations. Maybe they thought the vibrations were something
like the heat given off from friction. Not necessarily the main thing, just a
side effect.

For all we knew maybe it could be some sort of "sound light" or magnetism like
thing. Someone had to prove that it was vibrations all the way from the start
to the end.

~~~
WalterBright
Loud sounds make nearby things vibrate, which is easily felt. Even louder
sounds, like cannon fire, had obvious concussions and visible shock waves, and
you could feel the thump in your chest.

A bell ringing will set up visible vibrations in a nearby cup of water.

Instrument makers shaped sound in air boxes in violins, and shaped it in
horns. Sound has obvious propagation delays through air.

Maybe lay people had strange notions of sound, like flat earthers, but
educated and observant people would know better. The evidence was all around,
it did not need a lab experiment.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Also, human throats vibrate when speaking or humming. Drums, bells, triangles,
and plucked string instruments have visible vibrations.

~~~
WalterBright
And the eardrum itself with a diaphragm is clearly set up to detect air
vibrations, not some mystical force.

