"Fellow Townsmen and My Noble Constituents!": Representations of Oratory on Early Commercial Recordings

We live in a time of great preoccupation—in some quarters bordering on obsession—with the transformative effects of new technologies of communication—economic, social, cultural, cognitive, discursive. Oracles of the internet or computer multimedia or hypertext proclaim the revolutionary impact of these new media. Here, for example, is George Landow, one of the most frequently quoted prophets of hypertext (1997:21): "Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book. It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly on our literature, education, criticism, and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg's movable type." Landow, like most others who are engaged in constructing the ideology of the computer as a technology of communication in the guise of attempting to anticipate its effects, invokes the advent of print as a frame of reference, in tacit acknowledgment of just how powerful the ideology of the print revolution is in the symbolic construction of modernity.

But a closer analogy, in some ways, might be the invention of sound recording, a communicative technology scarcely a century and a quarter old that has in that brief time extended its reach throughout the globe and that has been accompanied by significant social transformations of its own. Where it took several centuries before intellectuals began to speculate self-consciously on the social and cultural implications of print or on its potential for commercial exploitation, the invention of sound recording technology by Thomas A. Edison in 1877 was accompanied from the moment of its accomplishment by projections about how it might be used and what social transformations might follow in its wake.

The advent of new technologies of communication and inscription will perforce be of interest to those of us concerned with the representation of performance, and indeed of anything else. In this paper we want to explore how the invention and early commercial development of the phonograph opened a cultural space for imagining how this new technology might be used for the representation of performance—specifically, oratorical performance—and how at least some of those imaginings were realized.

Imagining the Uses of the "Speaking Phonograph"

When Edison hit upon the mechanical means of inscribing sound in a reproducible form, toward the end of 1877, the capacity of the "speaking phonograph," as he called his invention, that most impressed him was that it allowed its user "to store up and reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly" (Edison 1989a:444). That is, it provided the means to overcome the ephemerality of the human voice; it made the spoken word durable as such, available for future reanimation, unlike writing, which required the transformation of the word into material and visual form for the sake of preserving it. The immediate question, then, was what kinds of speech were worthy of storing up toward future reproduction. For Edison, the quintessential inventor-entrepreneur, the answer had to lie in "practical use" (1989b:7), that is, something that would make money. One of the chief developmental goals that Edison framed for sound recording was "the transmission of such captive sounds through the ordinary channels of commercial intercourse and trade in material form, for the purposes of communication or as merchantable goods" (1878:530).

The first commercial application Edison pursued was targeted toward "business men and lawyers" (1989b:7), for use in letter-writing and other forms of dictation, a venture that proved notably unsuccessful because of the delicacy and complexity of the apparatus and the difficulty of making clearly intelligible recordings. Way down at the end of Edison's list of possible applications, after talking dolls, other mechanical toys, and alarm clocks, was "Speech and other Utterances.—It will henceforth be possible to preserve for future generations the voices as well as the...