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column by John Cosway is a mix of 50 years of media memories
and 15 years of buying and selling experiences via live and online
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- Cosway's Corner -
Thomas Edison made history with Mary's Little Lamb
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- Mary's Little Lamb opened door to sound recordings
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 By
John Cosway
Mary's Little Lamb, penned by Boston poet Sarah Josepha Hale
in May of 1830, was just a poem until inventor Thomas
Edison pushed it into the history books 130 years ago.
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- Sarah, born Oct. 24, 1788, in Newport,
New Hampshire, was a widowed mother of five when she wrote the
poem, based on a true incident involving young Mary Sawyer and
her persistent pet lamb.
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- Sarah lived a long and productive life
as a poet, prolific author, magazine editor and women's rights
advocate, before dying at age 91, but Mary's Little Lamb remains
her best-known work - in more ways than one.
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- While banker/composer Lowell Mason
put Mary's Little Lamb to music in the late 1830s, inventor Edison
decided to recite the first stanza of the poem in 1877 for the
world's first successful recording of a human voice.
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- Edison's breakthrough, using tinfoil
played back on a primitive cylinder "phonograph" he
invented, was brief and crackling. The inventor, who later called
Mary's Little Lamb a "little piece of practical poetry,"
recited:
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- Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow;
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
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- Historians say the prolific, Ohio-born
inventor, who died in 1931 at 84 with 1,093 successful U.S. patent
applications to his credit, was not the first to attempt to record
the human voice, but was the first to succeed.
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 Edison
was 21 when he obtained his first U.S. patent in June of 1868.
That patent and most of the 120 or so other patents granted him
prior to 1877 involved voting machines and telegraph machines.
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- His December 1877 phonograph patent
guaranteed him a voice in recording history, but at the time,
his goal was to provide businesses with dictation equipment,
not a vehicle for wide-scale music distribution.
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- So, little did Edison know his crackling
recording of Mary's Little Lamb was the seed for a technological
explosion that is still unfolding in the 21st century - from
tinfoil recordings to digital recordings for playback on CDs
and iPods.
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- (Unfortunately, that first tinfoil
recording was not preserved, but in 1927, Edison re-enacted the
recording for Fox Movietone news. It can be heard on the Recording
Technology History web site at http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/mary.html)
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- In 1877, Edison was not standing alone
in his field for long after his historic tinfoil
- recording and demonstrations of his
phonograph machine, which consisted of a "rotating drum,
a short screw-thread, a vibrating diaphragm and a sharp stylus."
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- He soon had competitors.
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- Edison progressed to wax cylinders
in 1886, but he was still focused on talking machines for dictation,
for spoken word recordings for blind people and for novelty voice
recordings by family members.
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- Enter Emile Berliner, a Washington,
D.C. inventor with music on his mind, who in 1887 invented the
gramophone for flat disc records. The hand-cranked recording
innovation became the dominant playback method for almost a century.
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- Berliner had used an Edison cylinder
machine to record The Lord's Prayer in 1884, which is now housed
at the BBC in England. But research showed his flat disc records
were more durable than Edison's wax cylinders and they could
also be mass-produced.
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- Edison, who also found the time to
invent something called the electric light bulb, finally saw
the light in the 1890s when his Speaking Phonograph Company didn't
catch on as anticipated. He added music to his cylinder recordings
menu. There were no Top 10 CHUM charts, but Sousa's marching
band had to be up there.
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- Flat discs for gramophones and round
cylinders for phonographs, the VHS vs Beta equivalents of their
day, co-existed into the 1920s before cylinders bit the dust.
- (Reasonably priced, pre-recorded Edison
wax cylinders can still be found at Ontario auctions, in antique
stores and markets and on eBay. More difficult to find are fully
functional cylinder players.)
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- When the gramophone became king, it
launched an endless line of consumer products, including players
housed in attractive and sometimes lavish wood cabinets that
became an integral part of living room furniture.
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- Plus records of various sizes and speeds.
(Did you know After the Ball, written in 1892 by Charles K.
Harris was the first record to sell a million copies?)
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- 78 rpm records,
or 78s for short: Historians say the actual playback speed of
early flat disc gramophone records in the 1880s and 1890s ranged
from 60 to 100, but levelled off to the standard 78 in the 1920s.
There were one-sided 78s, double-sided 78s, 7, 10 and 12-inch
78s, Edison's unique, but finicky, 1/4-inch thick Diamond Disc
78s etc. Millions of the brittle 78s ended up in pieces in the
trash over the past century or so, but millions more survive
to this day and are a collector's delight world-wide.
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- 33 1/3 rpm
Long Play records, LPs for short: Columbia Records, founded in
1888 for distribution of cylinder recordings, was first to introduce
the vinyl LP. It was June 21, 1948, and the first performer on
a double-sided, 10-inch, 33 1/3 rpm record was classical violinist
Yehudi Menuhin. It was the start of something big for
performers and listeners, who were treated to 23 full minutes
of uninterrupted music on each side. LPs were less fragile, but
still breakable. Added appeal: the album covers and liner notes
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- 45 rpm
records, 45s for short: RCA Victor had the honour of being first
in 1949 when it introduced the large hole, 7-inch vinyl 45 and
a compatible record player with an automatic changer. The 45
rpm format gave record buyers more listening time per record
than 78s, with either a single song on each side or multiple
EP selections. They were also less fragile and more compact for
storage. Also in 1949, RCA also became the first major label
to endorse all three playback speeds, 45, 33 1/3 and 78.
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- Records ruled the roost worldwide until
compact discs were introduced in 1982, with 52nd Street, Billy
Joel's 1978 best-selling album, being the first CD to hit
the streets.
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- So what would Thomas Edison have to
say about all of the recording advances in the 130 years since
his tin foil breakthrough?
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- Perhaps, he would ask how to upload
Mary Had a Little Lamb to his spiffy new iPod.
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- Other articles by John Cosway
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