Edison suggested that his phonograph could also be used for ‘the captivation of sounds, with or without the knowledge or consent of the source of their origin’.1
The newspapers, even the Academie Francaise, lauded ‘le phonographe, l’invention de M. Edison’ –
Now there is no doubt that by practice, and the aid of a magnifier, it would be possible to read phonetically Mr. Edison’s record of dots and dashes, but he saves us that trouble by literally making it read itself. The distinction is the same as if, instead of perusing a book ourselves, we drop it into a machine, set the latter in motion, and behold ! the voice of the author is heard repeating his own composition.
– Scientific American, New York, 22 December 18772
Scott felt betrayed.
Je supplie les braves gens – et il en existe encore, Dieu merci, – de ne pas oublier de prononcer mon nom dans cette affaire, car je suis prés de la vieillesse, je suis pére de deux fils et je ne puis leur laisser que la notoriété de mon nom.
–L. S. de M.3
I beg those good people – and there still are some, God be thanked – not to forget to say my name when speaking of this business, because I am growing old, I am the father of two sons, and I can leave them nothing but the importance of my name.
– L. S. de M.
Scott had six children.
His is the first voice to be sent into its future. First Sounds translated his phonautograph’s hieroglyphics back into sound and made him sing again – scratchy, and too slow, adrift in static –
In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell and the French astronomer Jules Janssen tried to use a ‘photophone’ to record the noises on the surface of the sun.4
More than three hundred years earlier, in the work of Rabelais, Panurge and Pantagruel heard cries and battle-din, fixed in winter ice, sound again in the thaw –
The words and cries of men and women, the hacking, slashing, and hewing of battle-axes, the shocking, knocking, and jolting of armours and harnesses –
Here, here, said Pantagruel, here are some that are not yet thawed –
He threw three or four handfuls of them on the deck –
When they had been all melted together, we heard a strange noise, hin, hin, hin, hin, his, tick, tock, taack, bredelinbrededack, frr, frr, frr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, track, track, trr, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrrr, on, on, on, on, on, on, ououououon –
– Rabelais, Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel, Book IV, lvi.
(Motteux’s translation, 1708)
22 April 1921: Ezra Pound wrote a letter to Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, recommending people to include in the next issue of The Little Review.5
Cocteau ourselves illustrations of work by Picabia W. c. Williams Brancusi etc. Cendrars Marianne Picasso Cros Mina Lewis Morand
Pound’s list had Marianne Moore and Charles Cros together. Cros had died in 1888, at the age of forty-five, when Moore was nine months old.
- Edison in The North American Review, 1878, cited in Brett Behm, pp. 191–192 ↩
- Online ↩
- É.-Léon Scott de Martinville, Le Problème de La Parole S’Écrivant Elle-Meme, Première édition provisoire, Paris, May, 1878, facsimile accessible online. ↩
- Brett Behm, ‘Paleophonic Futures’, pp. 186–187 ↩
- Literary Ladies Guide, online. ↩
