Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording Main Menu About Abstract for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P Introduction Introduction to Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording Notes Notes for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P Media Media for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P Acknowledgments Acknowledgments for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P Technical Information Technical Information for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P References References for “Making the Perfect Record,” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230, Duke U P This essay is part of the “New Media” special issue of American Literature (volume 85, number 4, December 2013). See http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230. Version 1 of the site is (c) 2013 by Duke University Press.

The Telegraphone

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As this essay’s object of inquiry, the telegraphone becomes an overdetermined site of a shared investment: noise-free magnetic audio. Put to a variety of uses and saturated with an array of meanings, it was imagined as a way to individuate people to high-fidelity sounds through immersed listening. It also corresponded with the opportunity to store and consolidate those sounds for later listening: to defer what was once ephemeral. Both of these tendencies were compounded by claims that magnetic recordings were perfect documentations of actuality. For instance, Smith’s thread was perceived as immediate precisely because of its magnetic character. It would not “inscribe” or “write” sounds. It would “capture” and “impress” them, affording reliable, indexical relationships without perceivable traces remaining on the storage medium.4 But regardless of its rhetoric, the telegraphone was a commercial failure. It was never available for widespread consumption. Still, the once-new device helps us better understand how people initially learned to simultaneously ignore, trust, and desire magnetic storage—to examine how faith in magnetic recording emerged between the 1870s and 1910s, well before now-ubiquitous hard drives (not to mention seemingly unlimited cloud storage).5 Put this way, the story of a failed sound machine offers a prehistory for contemporary computing, invested as it often is in the automagical transubstantiation of magnetic impressions (on platters) into data expressions (on screens and through speakers).6

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