Miss Newcomb and the Talking
Machine
Edited by ROBERT M. WARNER*
ON THE MORNING OF MAY 25, 1878, the
girls of the female
seminary at Painesville, Ohio,
interrupted their normal school rou-
tine to bark, mew, crow, and tell
Mother Goose rhymes to a most
unusual auditor--a strange looking
machine which listened pati-
ently to all their confidences and then
performed the amazing
feat of repeating them all back again
to the intrigued listeners.
For the first time in their lives the
girls were witnessing the record-
ing and reproduction of the human
voice.
Less than a year earlier Thomas A.
Edison, a promising young
inventor from the seminary students'
own state of Ohio, had con-
structed the world's first phonograph.1
While working on a high-
speed telegraph transmitter in his
laboratory at West Orange, New
Jersey, Edison obtained results which
upon further exploration and
development led him to construct a
recording machine. In his first
experimentation he used paraffin paper
tape to register the sound.
This method failed to produce a clear
recording and was replaced
after some weeks by the tin-foil
cylinder phonograph, which was
the type of machine seen by the
seminary girls.
It was probably in November or December
of 1877 when Edison,
using the tin-foil type machine, first
recorded a recognizable re-
production of his voice,2 reciting
on this historic occasion the
nursery rhyme, "Mary Had a Little
Lamb"--a most prosaic begin-
ning indeed for the world's first
venture into recording! The gov-
* Robert M. Warner is assistant curator
at the Michigan Historical Collections of
the University of Michigan.
1 The factual information about the
first phonograph and its exhibition was
obtained from Roland Gelatt's The
Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High
Fidelity (New
York, 1955), 17-27.
2 The
"official date" is given as August 12, 1877, but Gelatt believes this
date
"highly questionable,"
suggesting November or December, 1877, as being closer
to the truth. Ibid., 22.