Beautiful 1908 Edison Business Phonograph Model C with Electric Motor and Rheostat, Business Reproducer, Business Recorder, Oval Dictation Horn, Listening Tubes, and a Box of Brand-new Ediphone Cylinders, in fully Working Condition

In a Nutshell
I enjoyed a lot restoring this early 1908 Edison Business phonograph. I hope you learn something new when reading my writeup, and of course hope even more, that it will go into caring hands, ideally into a lawyers, doctors, or government office, or even will be used for recording again, since it is fully working now. The 12 brand-new cylinders included will store more than one hour of music, or almost two hours of a "dictators" voice.

Introduction:
There is no better introduction into a business phonograph than the 1910 movie "The Stenographer's Friend" or "What was Accomplished by an Edison Business Phonograph", starring Marc McDermott as office manager and John R. Cumpson as assistant. The phonograph I am going to present is essentially the same machine, as the one advertized in this original Edison commercial.

The phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931] in 1877, in the beginning was used as a business dictation device and was rented for amusement in "phonograph parlors". In 1878 Edison made a list for the uses of his phonograph. Number 1 of 10 points: "1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer". After inventing it, Edison lost interest and worked for his incandescent light bulb. In 1880 he started again by developing the Perfected Phonograph, already featuring the "spectacle" shaped double head for recording and play-back, as found in my machine. These early phonographs were all electrically powered, even the 1894 Class M (battery) and Class E (110V DC), relatives of the Perfected. Again Edison tried to sell them as dictation machines, but later converted them for use in phonograph parlors. In 1890 he had bought his company back from ill Jesse H. Lippincott [1842-1894], and after declaring bankruptcy in 1894, and thereby also getting back his rights on the phonograph, he started to build first machines for the home entertainment market, the "Class M Home" (1893), the "Amet Motor" (1895), the "Spring Motor" (1896), the "Home" (1897), the "Standard" (1898) and the "GEM" (1899) phonographs, the technically limited GEM selling for 7.50$ only. Have a look at my early 1899 4-clip Squaretop Standard in a parallel auction.
From a March 1898 Edison brochure: "...The phonograph is a talking machine, a singing machine, and a musical instrument, all in one...It will sing for you, it will play for you, it will repeat to you, the music of famous bands and orchestras, the sweet voices of famous singers, and the precious voices of family and friends, even though they be dead".
Alexander Graham Bell (the inventor of telephone), his cousin Chichester A. Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter, had developed the "Graphophone", using wax cylinders, Columbia's answer to Edison's business phonograph.
Originally neither Graphophones nor Edison Phonographs did well for office use: too short recording time, expensive machines ($225 for a Class M), messy batteries, mechanical problems. Edison introduced a new Business Phonograph in 1905, Columbia named their new machines "Dictaphones", and by 1908 (the year when the Edison Business Phonograph Company was incorporated), not least with the help of government agencies and big companies like Sears Roebuck, sales started to go up. My phonograph is from this very early period (1908), that is much before also Edison began to use a special name, "Ediphone" for their business sector in 1917.

Additional information:
ref.1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3gf6Edh6d8
ref.2: http://www.earlyofficemuseum.com/dictating_machines.htm
ref.3: http://www.nps.gov/edis/index.htm
ref.4: http://www3.sympatico.ca/jean-paul.agnard/phonograph/collection.htm
ref.5: http://www.sdparanormal.com/page/page/265918.htm


About my phonograph:
The restoration of this phonograph took almost a year. Both the recorder and the reproducer were there but defect, several minor parts were missing (end-of record bell tongue, pencil holder, listening tubes, the correct horn, blank cylinders). I spent many hours with reading, learning and asking questions, many more hours intermittently with producing styli from glass myself, and about 500$ for parts, finally insisting that they be all original (except listening tubes and horn, which are authentic however). In detail I

1. bought several business phonograph recorders and reproducers with sapphire styli (½ mm thick) for parts
2. bought a flat cone horn and listening tubes, both expertly made by Jean-Paul Agnard (ref.4)
3. bought an original box (NOS) of 12 Ediphone Master Wax Cylinders on eBay (one has been partly used for my movies)
4. made a pencil holder according to a photo sent to me by Eric von Grimmenstein
5. made the tongue for the end-of-record bell, also according to a photo from Eric

As shown in several pictures on the internet (see e.g. pict.s 41,42) and in the above movie, the phonograph had a simple conical horn, asymmetrically shaped into an oval at the open end (to better fit the "boss's mouth"?). With the help of Jean-Paul Agnard we designed a 1:1 in-scale horn of 16" length, to be made from aluminum, and he made it, to look very much like these originals. The funnel horn I found on the phonograph turned out to belong to another phonograph I had bought at the same occasion, that is offered in a parallel auction, a Standard Model A 4-clip Squaretop from around 1899 (see separate Project). Jean-Paul also sells excellent reproductions of listening tubes, which were very often used instead of horns to shield from external noise, especially in phonograph parlors and for business machines. They look infinitely better than the ones I made (and you can make) from Home Depot parts. Finally I should confess that one part is still missing: the pneumatic foot switch providing the remote for the Start-Stop switch of the phonograph. The pneumatics work as demonstrated by sucking and blowing on a tube connected to the phonograph side (movie, click on last picture) - I never saw an instance of this foot switch. Read more about the myths and facts of business phonographs under techies below. Movies 49 and 50 show recording and reproducing. Reproducing is done via the listening tubes held near to the microphone of my cheap Kodak C643 camera, which explains the limited quality of playback. Pict. 46 shows the shavings coming off the cylinder after recording. Picts. 47 and 48 show, that I (on purpose) chose a cylinder with a visibly bad surface on one side for recording, which is reflected in the noise pattern in movie 50. During my research I came across the "Psycho-Phone" (ref.5), and thought, that my phonograph could be easily converted into one, since it has an electric motor and a nice start-stop mechanism. Just kidding.

Myths and Facts, for the techies only:

"A business phonograph won't play Blue Amberols"
True: As explained next, the drive mechanism causes a 4min Amberol cylinder to skip (in average) every 4^th track. Otherwise it's ok, the mandrel diameter is ok, the stylus size is still ok.

"A business phonograph cannot play music"
Wrong: A business phonograph reads and writes records with 150 tpi (tracks per inch), whereas a 2-minute machine reads and writes 100 tpi and a 4-minute machine reads 200 tpi records. Records thus have to be played on the proper machine type. I was told that changing from 100 to 150 tpi was done by purpose, since secretaries were not supposed to listen to music, but only to take and write from their boss's dictations, and that the final 200 tpi format was - well - progress. Recording speeds in the beginning were at about 90 rpm (revolutions per minute) and later standardized at 120 rpm, independent of the record type. This is why every phonograph has a speed control regulated by a governor. A Blue Amberol cylinder (200 tpi) of 4" length, of which 60% is actual music, played at 120 rpm, therefore takes 4(")x 0.6 x 200(tpi)/120(rpm)=4 minutes.
The above discussion does not conclude that no music can come from a business phonograph. Since the speed is about the same, the quality of music is in fact the same for all machine types. The difference comes when the total capacity is considered. Since Ediphone cylinders, used on business machines are 50% longer in size than normal (6"), and track density is 50% higher than on 2-minute machines, the total time is 4½ minutes compared to 2 minutes, even exceeding the one of 4-minute machines. Of course in practice recording speed was reduced when dictating, so allowing dictations to extend way beyond 4½ minutes. Each machine can play back whatever it recorded before, be it Wagner's Valkyrie or Grand-mothers spoken last will.
Now - what happens, if you replay a wrong cylinder on a business machine? The recorder-reproducer carriage is driven by a spindle, independently of any existing grooves on a cylinder. Thus in average every 150/(150-100)=3^rd track of a 2-minute cylinder will be repeated, and every 200/(200-150)=4^th track of a 4-minute cylinder will be skipped. In reality, since the reproducer has lateral degrees of freedom, it will stay in line for some time and then jump a few tracks at once, backwards or forwards, respectively. Don't be fooled by drawings from Edison's patent specifications, they are - and again, I was told by purpose - not drawn to scale. A track, at a volume level limited by the requirement that it does not overlap with its neighbour (and thus risk a repeated or jumped track), is only 15 micrometers deep (size of a thin women's hair), when recorded with a cylindrical stylus of 0.5 mm diameter (pict.33). The picture demonstrates two more facts: a) only the lower 40/360=11% of the circumference of a (cylindrical) recorder stylus are used and have to be shaped properly, and b) the enormous sensitivity of the human ear.
Conclusion:
Fun loving bosses should hire musicians as secretaries
Fun loving secretaries should lobby their bosses to hire more musician-secretaries to form a band

"This phonograph doesn't have a crank? So it can't be old"
Wrong: As discussed above in the beginning all phonographs had electric motors, either powered by a storage battery, or by 110V DC. My (1908) phonograph has a variable rheostat on its back, accommodating any electrical power source from 220V DC down to 110V 133 cycle AC (pict.44). The first spring motor was made by Edison in 1895, almost 20 years after he invented the phonograph. Motivations for change were the messy batteries, safety concerns, and such simple things like the wish to limit phonograph parlor sessions to the time paid for. For spring motors a speed-stabilizer (governor) is mandatory, for electric motors only necessary to manually vary the speed. Some later business phonographs were also made with spring motors, before finally going back to electricity and ending up in the long-lived era of Ediphones.

Here are the specifications:

This phonograph is sold. Please have a look at more radios, phonographs and gramophones   here
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