The audible content consists of trilled R’s, then the numbers “one, two, three, four, five, six,” and then more trilled R’s. The voice is almost certainly Tainter’s. Because they’re so distinctive and recorded so well, trilled R’s had been a staple of earlier experiments on the photophone (1880), and they also carried over into early test recordings like this one, enabling us to eavesdrop on the same experimental tradition that gave us Alexander Graham Bell’s famous “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you” of 1876.

This artifact is the first electrotype negative Tainter made, between October 17 and 20. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out very well—the groove was well defined, but large chunks of content were missing near the disc’s outer edge. Rather than trying to press positive copies from it, Tainter deposited it in a sealed package at the Smithsonian to document the accomplishment.

Charles Sumner Tainter had begun experimenting with laterally modulated “zig-zag” disc recordings in May 1881, anticipating the gramophone disc of Emile Berliner—the direct ancestor of the twentieth century’s well-known 78s, 45s, and LPs. After trying various materials, Tainter settled briefly on cutting original records in a mixture of wax and paraffin. But his ambitions didn’t stop there. In October, he and Chichester Bell decided to pursue the idea of electroplating recorded discs of this sort with copper and then using the negative electrotype copies to stamp out playable duplicates, a process they hoped could form the basis for a future commercial recording industry.

Another recording made in the same way and on the same day—but not yet available for listening—features the word “phonography” instead of “barometer.” The speaker in both cases is probably Rogers. Earlier in 1884, Tainter and Rogers had begun making photographic glass disc recordings using modulated jets of bichromate of potash, but their experiments of October and November—including this disc—show them applying the same photographic approach to a more familiar diaphragm-and-stylus method of capturing sound vibrations from the air.

This recording of the test word “barometer” repeated several times is one of the few Volta Laboratory recordings that had already been heard in living memory before December 2011, thanks to an earlier playback effort by Floyd Harvey . It was recorded on November 17, 1884, using the fourth of four recording techniques described in U. S. Patent 341,213: a wide stylus attached to a diaphragm caused variations in the height of a narrow slit through which light passed on its way to a rotating round glass photographic plate, exposing a spiral “saw-tooth” trace of varying width. Like many of the Smithsonian’s photographic glass disc recordings, this one is signed by Harry G. Rogers, an associate who helped Sumner Tainter with phonographic experiments in this period.



Photo by Rich Strauss, Smithsonian Hear this recording