An Archaeology of Edison’s Metal Box

For most scholars of Victorian media, 1878 is the year of the tinfoil phonograph.¹ In the 18 May 1878 issue of Scientific American, Edison introduces audiences to the now-famous hearing and speaking machine, giving them no small dose of hyperbole. He claims the machine will change virtually all aspects of Victorian culture by captivating “fugitive” sounds and affording their inscription, reproduction, and circulation at will—regardless of their original sources (1973). Among other applications, it will be used for dictation and letter writing; to record music, lectures, and family events; and even to make talking books, clocks, and toys (1973−74). But Edison does not stop there. Near the end of his article, he suggests the phonograph will eventually be connected with the telephone in order to create an entirely new device that will record otherwise fleeting and ephemeral conversations conducted by wire. Often ignored or overlooked by scholars, this device is called the carbon telephone, and it was prototyped by Edison and his team by 1878.² In fact, in that May 1878 issue of Scientific American, Edison claims he has already invented it and is “constantly improving upon it” (1974). However, the carbon telephone was not publicly released until 1914, more than thirty-five years after its appearance on paper. The exact reasons for this delay are difficult to isolate. Nevertheless, Edison’s investments in incandescent light during the 1880s and ’90s—not to mention general cultural reluctance to record private telephone communications—were no doubt contributing factors.

By 1914, the carbon telephone underwent a name change, too. It became the telescribe, but it functioned more or less as Edison explains it in Scientific American. It was a simple metal box, in which a dry battery and transmitter were encased. It also featured a pneumatic switch, socket, and substitute receiver, and a phonograph horn could be attached to it. Even though the box itself was simple, the process of using it to connect a phonograph with a telephone was not. First, a user would remove the telephone receiver from the telephone’s hook and plug the receiver directly into a socket located on top of the metal box. Next, with its horn attached, the box would be placed in close proximity to a phonograph, which would ultimately act as a dictation machine. The user would then place a call via an operator, press the pneumatic switch to start recording, and begin speaking—through a telephone transmitter—to a subscriber on the other end. Since the primary telephone receiver was plugged into the socket, the user would rely on the telescribe’s substitute receiver to hear a telephone conversation. Throughout the conversation, the telescribe would record any sonic input received by both the primary and substitute receivers (including any input from an operator), and a diaphragm in each would vibrate, sending a signal to the transmitter inside the metal box (Bryan 224). This transmitter would then send the signal through the horn (attached to the box) to a recording horn on the phonograph. The phonograph would receive the signal, transduce it through its diaphragm, and make cuts on a wax cylinder accordingly. (By 1914, Edison’s recording machines used wax, not tinfoil, cylinders as their storage medium.) The output of this entire process was a “telescript”—a record of telephone conversations produced as they were heard, despite the geographic distance between parties. Thus, according to Edison, the fallibilities of stenographers, the mediations of text, the deferrals of the post, the labours of handwriting, and the ephemerality of sound were all matters of the past (1973−74). The future of sound, inscription, and synchronous communications was reserved for “full and correct texts” (“Indelible Talk” 216), and time and space would be annihilated once people knew they could “bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man” (Edison 1974).

Yet this close attention to the technical and material particulars of Edison’s Frankenmachine suggests that the telescribe—or the carbon telephone—was less about producing a perfect recording of immediate sound and more about shaping communications and disciplining the senses during the late nineteenth and early...