Edison's Display at the Paris Exhibition (1889)
1 2013-12-13T17:16:38-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339 249 3 From: The Paris universal exhibition album, 1889 = Exposition universelle de Paris = la Exposicion universal de Paris / published under the patronage of the American Commission plain 2013-12-13T17:43:56-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339This page has paths:
- 1 2013-11-26T14:30:08-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339 Media Jentery Sayers 6 All Media for Making the Perfect Record, American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P plain 8387 2013-12-19T08:58:37-08:00 Jentery Sayers becbfb529bffcfafdfad6920ed57b30ccdca5339
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Incandescent Light
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Edison’s Work on Electric Light Takes Precedence over Phonography
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Tim Brooks (2004, 26) writes: “After the exhibition of his first crude tinfoil apparatus in 1878-79, Thomas Edison virtually abandoned the phonograph to work on the electric light. He did not return to work on it until 1886, when the expiration of his major commitments to the electric light, and the hot breath of competition from other inventors working on sound recording, brought him back into the fray.”(This note comments on the page titled, “Not a Worthwhile Investment,” as well as the attached image titled, “Edison's Display at the Paris Exhibition (1889).”)
- 1 2013-10-14T18:17:11-07:00 The Myth of the Lone Inventor 3 Scientific exhibitions often give the impression that inventors work and succeed individually by masking all of the work that went into a product for the sake of the shock value that having a new product simply "appear" would have on an audience. plain 2013-12-13T17:24:26-08:00 Consider the 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition in London, the ephemeral lavishness of which fascinated Walter Benjamin, namely due to correlations between such lavishness and free trade.30 There are also Thomas Edison’s demonstrations of electric light at the 1881 Paris Exhibition and the phonograph at the 1889 Paris Centennial of the French Revolution. The list goes on, and one persuasive interpretation of these demonstrations is that they foster myths of the lone inventor, 31 often a textbook hero of some entrepreneurial class in US culture.32 Such myths reduce a set of complex activities (e.g., the labors of production, research, and advertising) to a single product borne by a genius scientist or engineer.33 They also bolster bootstrap narratives of upward mobility not unlike a Horatio Alger story. Moreover, the mystification of a technology enables what Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) calls a “medial ideology,” or mass attention to the formal qualities of a given medium at the expense of a technology’s material particulars.34 In the case of the telegraphone, the aesthetic appeal of magnetic wire’s perfect record overshadowed the physical limitations of the technology’s hardware and the labor involved in creating it. In many ways, the telegraphone was vaporware at the turn of the century.35
