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

The Telegraphone

In the following paragraphs, I explore this articulation of early magnetic audio with perception, memory, faith, and record making, examining texts published between the 1870s and 1910s. Oscillating between technical, business, cultural, and literary approaches to media and technologies, my aim is not to privilege one approach over the others. It is to exhibit how they collectively inform a series of historical incongruities, all of which are anchored in a device called the telegraphone.

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 through immersed listening to high-fidelity sounds. 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. 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). 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).

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A Materialist Approach to Hard Drives For a thoroughly materialist approach to the hard drive and contemporary magnetic recording, see Kirschenbaum (2008). In the first chapter, Kirschenbaum claims, quite importantly, that “computer storage media also have their affordances, but as storage in general has become more capacious and less immediately tangible it is easy to overlook them. . . . Attention to the affordances of various kinds of storage media can reveal much about computing in different contexts, allowing us to reconstruct salient aspects of now-obsolete systems and the human practices that attended them” (32). (This note comments on the page titled, "The Telegraphone," as well as the attached image titled, "Hard Disk Drive with Disks and Motor Hub Removed.")
Perceivable Traces Engaging the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Doane (2007, 5) asks: “What is the relation between the index as trace or impression and the index as pointing, deixis (Peirce’s insistence that the word ‘this’ is the most telling example of the index)?” If only elliptically, this essay responds to her question. (This note comments on the page titled, “The Telegraphone.”)
Screen Essentialism For instance, according to both Nick Montfort and Matthew Kirschenbaum, a bias (in media studies and elsewhere) for computer screens enables an inattention to the materiality of computational processes and electronic texts. For more, see Montfort (2004) and Kirschenbaum (2008, 31–35). Montfort’s term for this bias is screen essentialism.

(This note comments on the page titled, "The Telegraphone.")

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