Introduction: Phonographic Reading

Users of the early phonograph could record and replay sounds, unlike users of the playback-only gramophone. The phonograph’s ability to replay music for listening to was just one of its potential uses. In his essay published a year after his invention, “The Phonograph and Its Future” (1878), Thomas Edison offered a series of ten other uses, first and most important of which is “Letter-writing, and other forms of dictation.” It could also record speeches and novels (comparable to audiobooks today), for example, and provide a “family record.”1Close Users of the phonograph could, in other words, record the sound of the voice for themselves and for others, dictating their letters or reading their novels into it, and preserving the sounds of family members in a personal archive. The phonograph began to challenge previous functions of written text, which could seem inadequate in the face of the superior capacities of the recording machine. For “letter-writing,” the correspondent need now only speak into the phonograph, explained Edison. The recording (at this stage on a “sheet of foil”) could then be sent to the addressee who, placing it upon their own phonograph, “listens to what his correspondent has to say.” Edison claimed that this method of communication had great advantages over traditional letter-writing. No longer would business communications have to be dictated to clerks, “to be written out”; the phonograph would allow people to dictate their letters directly to recipients and thereby gain privacy in their communications.2Close Along with its promise of increased efficiency and privacy, the phonograph would enhance the expressiveness of communications: