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Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording

Responding to Edison's Noise

In the history of technologies before and after 1888, a drive toward the abstraction and standardization of both information and perception is certainly nothing novel. However, what makes the case of early magnetic recording unique is that Oberlin Smith bundled that abstraction and standardization with a critique of mechanical noise, which abraded cultured ears as it revealed technical flaws. One such flaw was the friction between a needle and groove caused during the playback of mechanically recorded sound inscribed on tinfoil. As magnetic audio historian Mark H. Clark notes in “The Magnetic Recording of Sound,” Oberlin Smith visited Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory in early 1878, ten years prior to his publication in Electrical World and just after Edison patented the cylinder phonograph (1999c, 7).

While examining Edison’s new device, Smith was struck by a scratchy noise generated during playback. It was a noise that mechanical recordings simply could not avoid, and it offended Smith’s ears. As a response, he proposed magnetic recording, where no audible, physical contact would be made between the storage medium (for example, thread) and the playback mechanism (for example, an electromagnet).

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Certainly Nothing Novel For prior intersections of thread with standardization and alienated labor, see Babbage 334 {Au: Is this from 1961 or 1963?} and Plant (1997, 15–16) on computation and Jacquard’s loom. Of course, Marx also wrote about spinning and weaving machines, with an occasional response to Babbage. See Chapter 15, “Machinery and Modern Industry,” Capital and “Division of Labour and Mechanical Workshop. Tool and Machinery” in Collected Works, Vol. 33. {Au: Please provide the page ranges for these two chapters.}

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Scratchy Noise Smith’s response to Edison’s phonograph was written in a memorandum dated September 23, 1878, roughly ten years prior to the publication of “Some Possible Forms of Phonograph” in Electrical World. The memorandum is reproduced in Clark’s “The Magnetic Recording of Sound” (1999c, 8). Why Smith took ten years to publish his hypotheses is difficult to determine. One reason may be that by 1888 he realized he had neither the time nor the resources to dedicate to magnetic recording. (This note comments on the page titled, "Responding to Edison's Noise.")
Cylinder Phonograph In 1878, Edison’s cylinders were wrapped in tinfoil. Wax cylinders came shortly thereafter and were mass-marketed in the 1880s (the decade when Smith published “Some Possible Forms of Phonograph”).

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