Ohio History Journal

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.

• 1
 

MISS NEWCOMB         149

ernment confirmed Edison's invention with a patent issued Feb-

ruary 19, 1878.

In order to exploit the commercial potential of this machine, a

company was formed in January 1878 to control its manufacture

and exhibition. A lyceum operator from Boston, James Redpath,

was given the task of handing out assignments of territory to a

group of demonstrators trained in the use of the phonograph. It

was probably two of these demonstrators--a Mr. Martin and an

unnamed companion--who brought the phonograph to Painesville

in the spring of 1878 and introduced it to the seminary girls.

Considering the novelty of the machine, it is not surprising that

one of the faculty members, Mary E. Newcomb, was so impressed

by the demonstration that she wrote an unusually complete descrip-

tion of it the same day she witnessed the event. Although her

claim that she was the first woman in Ohio to have had her voice

recorded may be disputed, Miss Newcomb's detailed and often

amusing record of her experience has given us a good example

of the popular reaction which greeted the unique machine and an

excellent picture of its appearance and operation.

Miss Newcomb, who was twenty-three years old at the time,

described the operation of Edison's phonograph in a letter to her

father, Dr. Roland B. C. Newcomb, a pioneer physician of Bliss-

field, Michigan. The letter is reproduced below exactly as it was

written except for the omission of the last few paragraphs, which

deal with matters other than the phonograph demonstration. The

letter is located in the Roland B. C. Newcomb Papers, Michigan

Historical Collections, University of Michigan.

 

Painesville, May 25th '78

Dear Father

I am full of one idea today and might as well begin on it immediately.

Of course you have heard of Mr. Edison's wonderful invention--the

Phonograph--the marvelous talking machine that carefully imitates and

repeats all that is confided to it. The papers have of late been full of it

and Ohio girls have gloried in the fact the man who is the master of this

seemingly impossible wonder--a talking machine--hails from the Buckeye

State; but knowing Mr. Edison to be in Paris, we never though[t] of seeing

the Phonograph for years at least. But two enterprising New Yorkers have

• 2
 

150     THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

the right of displaying it through this section of the country and last

night gave an experimental lecture here in Painesville.

This morning they set up the machine in our Sem'y³ Chapel so that our

girls had the opportunity of seeing and hearing it, and experimenting

largely with it.

Mr. Martin, after explaining the mechanism, said a few words in a very

loud tone of voice, directly over the mouthpiece; and soon came back to

us very clearly but not very loud: "Good morning ladies. Allow me to

introduce to you Edison's marvelous invention, the Phonograph." The

voice was so small and thin that it seemed like a burlesque and we all

burst into a hearty laugh.

We have seen in the papers among the practical uses of the phonograph,

that one might be to preserve the dying words of friends, but if they

came to one in that tone I fear the effect would be impaired and the

solemnity forgotten.

Next the gentleman repeated that classic stanza:

 

"There was a little girl, and she had a little curl

Right down in the middle of her forehead

And when she was good she was very, very good

But when she was bad she was horrid"

 

and it came back faithfully word for word with a special emphasis on

the "horrid."

Then it was invited to spell "Constantinople" which it did remarkably

well for its age--only five months.

It laughed and coughed and whistled successfully, and then I was

called upon to teach it to sing. It repeated the words of the chorus of

"Hold the Fort" as well as could be desired but evidently it has not a

correct musical ear for it changed the key "ad libitum." This last fault

however Mr. Martin took upon himself saying that it was due to the

irregular motion of the crank he was turning. Many of the girls barked,

mewed, crowed, and repeated Mother Goose rhymes to it. All were faith-

fully mimiced [sic].

Finally Miss Porter & I sang "John Brown's Body" into its private ear

and it performed the very wonderful feat of singing soprano and alto

at the same time.

Along in 1900 when Phonographs are a feature in everyone's sitting

 

3 Probably the "Lake Erie Female Seminary," which was located in Painesville.

Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1908), II, 43.

• 3
 

MISS NEWCOMB           151

 

room, I shall have the pleasure of telling admiring juveniles that I was the

first lady in Ohio who ever spoke into one.

My! but isn't it a good thing for Mr. Edison that he didn't live in

Salem 200 yrs. ago. They would have given him a nice toasting for being

a wicked wizard. But the machine is so very simple it seems a wonder

that no one ever thought it out before--it is simply a cylinder about 18 in.

long and 9 in dia[meter] that is turned by a crank--in the perfected

machines they are run by clock work. Around this cylinder is a thin

sheet of tin-foil and so arranged that it can be fastened just above the

revolving tin-foil, or carried back free from it, is a mouth piece with a

ferrotype plate with a little needle in the center on the underside: when

the mouthpiece is placed above the revolving cylinder and and [sic] some

one is speaking in it, the waves of sound depress the plate and the needle

makes a little dot in the tin foil. After the message is finished, the

cylininder [sic] is brought back to the starting point, and again set in motion

and the needle passing into these little drepressions [sic], the same waves

of sound are set in motion and the message is reproduced. [An ink blot

appears on the letter at this point.] (This blot was caused by a spider; in

getting away from him I didn't notice where my pen went to, but it

landed just here)

I send you a piece of the tin foil on which Miss Porter & I sang "Sweet

By and By" and "Hold the Fort." The almost imperceptible little dots

in the grooves are the work of the Phonograph, and if you only had one

of the right size you could reproduce about an inch of each piece. Funny

isn't it to measure music & conversation by the sq. inch. In proof that the

Phonograph is practical Mr. Martin said that England had offered Mr.

Edison $200,000.00 and an interest for the right to introduce and use

the Phonograph. And Mr. M. is of the opinion that in a little while one

can be obtained here for $25.00. Some one suggested that such an instru-

ment would be invaluable for Gen. Exercises here, and I think it would,

for the average girl has to hear anything four times over before she takes

in the full extent of it.

[At this point Miss Newcomb concludes her discussion of the phono-

graph. The remaining one-third of her letter describes a visit to Cleve-

land.]

Yrs. with love for all,

Libbie⁴

 

4 Permission to publish Miss Newcomb's letter has been kindly granted by her

niece, Mrs. Hazel Barnard of Clinton, Michigan.

• 4