The technology to record sound on a wax cylinder is extremely simple: All you need is an armature connected to a cone of paper at one end and a needle stylus at the other, plus the requisite wax cylinder. Playback is exactly analogous to recording, in that all of the actions are reversed. No electrical power is needed: Edison designed hand-cranked devices, not electrical contraptions.
So, why did it take us so long to figure all of this out?
The most delicate piece of machinery needed for the production of a phonograph is a machine to make needles of the requisite sharpness, but even cave men had bone needles.
The most complex piece of machinery needed to make a phonograph work is the armature. A certain skill is needed to get the ratios correct, but such skill is directly related to experience. Clocks designed in the Middle Ages showed a grasp of mechanical fine detail far in advance of what a phonograph would need.
What am I missing? Why couldn’t Thomas Jefferson have either designed his own phonograph or bought an existing model?
I used Thomas Jefferson as a time reference. Why couldn’t have the phonograph existed in the 18th century? Indeed, why couldn’t it have existed in the 15th century?
The phonograph is the only invention I can think of whose prerequisites seem to have been in place for centuries before its actual invention.
Okay, it’s probably because the founding work in acoustics wasn’t done until 1809 by Ernst Chladni. He was the one that (I think) first addressed questions like how sound was transmitted, and what it actually was.
In the 3000 years of smelting metals, no one figured out that they could boil steam to turn a wheel or push a piston that makes something move and accomplishes something (usually the same thing accomplished by a water wheel or windmill). Or, rather, no one figured out a way to apply it.
A lot of inventions wait in time for someone to come along and happen to have a wild thought cross their minds. Steam power, gunpowder as a weapon, printing press, using small bumps in a material to store information… many inventions are accidents of society more than results of scientific breakthroughs.
There’s no fundamental reason that the phonograph couldn’t have been invented earlier (I once wrote a story about an early phonograph, way pre-Edison. Fiction, of course). What was supposed to have inspired Edison was his hearing a “playback recording telegraph” at high speed. This was a waxed disc that had the telegraph “dits” and “dashes” recorded by impressing them into the disc. At high speed. he imagined that it sounded like music or speech. This gave it an advantage over the smoked-glass recording method, in that it immediately suggested the mechanism for the phonograph. So the quick answer is that we needed an analogue to suggest the phonograph, and that wasn’t provided until the recording telegraph came along.
Incidentally, there is the possibility of pre-Edison recordings. As Arthur C. Clarke noted in an essay (collected in his volume The View from Serendip, siomeone has claimed to recover ancient recordings from chance media – brushstrolesd of paint and turned pottery. He cited an actual letter to Science or Nature magazine. The “Daedalus” column in Nature suggested a very similar idea, in fact.
So, CalMeecham, a piece of fiction that you wrote supports the OP’s contention. Is that the point that you’re trying to make? Or is your assertion simply the unsupported “there’s no fundamental reason”?
Perhaps the reason the phonograph came about when it did, Desmostylus, is that was the point the “impossibly complex” became achievably simple (to quote back to my second link).
Hero of Alexandria designed a sphere a couple-thousand years ago that rotated by directing jets of steam; but as you said, no one figured out a way to apply it. It seems it was just an interesting toy.
That’s a large part of it. Inventions often proceed by building upon ideas that have preceded them. Lasers didn’t come around until the maser had been invented, even though the technology needed to construct a laser had existed long before that time. The Laser was created because it was the visible light analogue to the Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. So, too, with the recording phonograph and the recording telegraph.
Look at the paperclip…is there anybody reading this that could not have taken a piece of wire and bent it to create this ingenious little invention?
The phonograph also seems so simple - now. At the time, the idea of recording sounds must have seemed other-wordly.
I think most inventions and technical breakthroughs look ridiculously simple in retrospect.
I am sure in 100 years, people will look back and say - “Geez, back in 2003 they had computers, electricity, magnets and Pinto beans - and not one of them could create a simple anti-gravity machine? Idiots…”
No, I meant that, sometimes, inventions come about, out of all the parts developed thus far, when the complexity of ideas becomes achievably simple (Hence my requoting of the phrase I did). A case of “why didn’t I think of that?” So, yes, I agree with Tangent that DMark has summed it up nicely.