Who Was Thomas Alva Edison 爱迪生Chapter 4 His Invention Factory

In the mid 1 1800s, a man in France and a man in Massachusetts both came up with ways to record sound—but as a pattern on paper much the way the dots and dashes of Morse code look on paper.



Nobody had figured out how to record sounds and play them back so they could be heard again. That’s what Tom wanted to do. He had an idea. But he didn’t know if it would work. He had drawn 2 some rough sketches 4. But that was all.



For eight months Tom and his team kept working on his idea for a phonograph. They were working on other inventions too. They were not in a big hurry. But then an article appeared in an important magazine, Scientific American. It said that Thomas Edison had invented an amazing machine. It played the human voice. “A wonderful invention,” they announced with great fanfare 5. Tom knew that everyone would be asking to hear his amazing phonograph.



Now Tom was in a big hurry.



Had someone at Menlo Park told a reporter about what Tom was working on? Maybe. Tom didn’t mind. Maybe he even knew who had told the magazine about the phonograph. He liked publicity 6. But now he had to make his phonograph. And soon.



It was November 1877. Tom sat down and did another rough sketch 3. He gave it to his best machinist. Anyone else might look at his drawing and wonder how to follow it. But this machinist was used to Tom’s sketches. A week later he came back with a model.



The model had a long screw with a handle at one end. The screw ran through the middle of a metal cylinder 7 wrapped in tinfoil 8. On either side of the cylinder was a metal disk with a pin and a short hollow tube.



Tom leaned toward the machine, turned the handle, and spoke 9 into one of the tubes as the cylinder moved along the screw. “Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.”



The sound of Tom’s voice made the metal disk with the pin vibrate and scratch a sound pattern on the tinfoil. When he stopped speaking, Tom pulled the pin away from the cylinder. He turned the handle in the opposite direction and moved the cylinder back to where it had been. He put the pin on the other side against the cylinder.







Now was the big moment. Tom turned the handle again. The cylinder moved along the screw and out came his voice speaking the lines of the familiar nursery rhyme.



Tom was almost as surprised as everyone else. He could hardly believe that his phonograph worked the very first time.



Tom went to the offices of Scientific American to play his wonderful phonograph. The excited editors crowded around. Wow! They had never seen—or heard—anything like it.



In April 1878, Tom traveled to Washington, D.C. There he spoke to the National Academy of Sciences about his invention. He also had his photograph taken by Matthew Brady, the famous Civil War photographer.







After a long day of meetings and receptions, President Rutherford B. Hayes asked Tom to come to the White House. It was eleven o’clock at night by the time he got there. The president was so impressed with Tom’s phonograph that he made Mrs. Hayes get out of bed to hear it.



At first Tom thought companies would use his phonograph in business. He saw it as a kind of dictating 10 machine for writing letters. Businesses did use it. It was called the Ediphone.



But during his lifetime Tom saw his phonograph’s popularity grow in ways he hadn’t expected.



There was a big demand for music—in concert halls and in penny arcades 11. For five cents, several people could listen to a song at the same time. Soon people wanted their own phonographs at home.



Years later Tom wrote an article about all the ways the phonograph might be used one day. He saw far into the future. He even predicted audiotapes. He called them “talking books.”



Tom was always working on more than one idea at a time. Perhaps he didn’t pay as close attention to his phonograph as he should have. His company, the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company in New York City, made and sold phonographs using his cylinders 12. But other companies went on to develop a more popular machine. It used flat disks called records.



Tom was only thirty years old when he invented his phonograph. At that young age, he became known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”



The phonograph may have been Tom’s “baby”—and his favorite. But it was the next invention that made him far more famous. Tom was about to work on something that would change the way people live forever.

HOW THE PHONOGRAPH WORKS



TO RECORD: SOUND ENTERS HORN, VIBRATES A DIAPHRAGM WITH A NEEDLE THAT CAUSES INDENTATIONS ON A TURNING CYLINDER COVERED WITH TINFOIL.



TO PLAY BACK: THE INDENTATIONS ON THE CYLINDER VIBRATE A NEEDLE AND DIAPHRAGM ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE AND THE SOUND EXITS HORN.

MATTHEW BRADY



MATTHEW BRADY STUDIED PHOTOGRAPHY IN NEW YORK CITY UNDER SAMUEL MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE TELEGRAPH. HE PHOTOGRAPHED LOTS OF FAMOUS AMERICANS, INCLUDING ABRAHAM LINCOLN. HE TOOK ONE PICTURE RIGHT BEFORE LINCOLN BECAME PRESIDENT. IT TOOK BRADY ABOUT FIFTEEN SECONDS TO TAKE THE PHOTOGRAPH. LINCOLN HAD TO WEAR A CLAMP TO HOLD HIS HEAD PERFECTLY 13 STILL. OTHERWISE, THE PHOTO WOULD LOOK BLURRY 14.



DURING THE CIVIL WAR, BRADY WAS THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPHER TO TAKE PICTURES OF BATTLEFIELDS.