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.
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
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.
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.