Post Defense Draft
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Vox Machinae: Phonographs and the Birth of Sonic Modernity, 1877-1930 by Jacques Vest A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Howard Brick, Co-Chair Professor James Cook, Co-Chair Associate Professor John Carson Professor Charles Garrett Assistant Professor Perrin Selcer Jacques Vest [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5891-9541 © Jacques Vest 2018 DEDICATION For Mom, Dad and Brandon. !ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to express my gratitude, first, to my dissertation committee. Charles Garrett was a remarkably generous outside reader whose enthusiasm and encouragement buoyed this project at every stage. Perrin Selcer graciously signed onto the committee mid-stream and has been an invaluable resource in thinking through the technology-related problems of this dissertation. Even though he was on the other side of the globe, John Carson made a full-time job of reining in my more exuberant historical claims and this project would not be nearly as well-articulated were it not for our many Skype conversations. These pages have also benefited enormously from committee co-chair Howard Brick’s impatience with sloppy writing and thinking. I do not, as it turns out, have much to say about Marxian commodity fetishism. I would like to extend a special thanks to my advisor and committee co-chair Professor Jay Cook. It is safe to say that Jay and I represent two opposite ends of the cognitive spectrum. Jay is a meticulous planner, efficient and even-tempered. I am often disorganized, forgetful, and impulsive. These temperamental differences have caused occasional friction over the years, but —from my standpoint, at any rate—they’ve also been remarkably generative. Jay has consistently pushed me to channel my creative impulses and to speak intelligibly to the discipline and to the broader world; and through his feedback and his own scholarship, he has taught me the joy that is a big dense footnote. He occasionally had to remind me that I was writing history !iii —not speculative philosophy or science fiction—but he was always just as excited as I was to see how capacious a concept this business of “history” might be. Jay has been a tireless advocate on my behalf and has helped me land on my feet more times than one. Finally, I’d like to thank my family. My grandparents Joseph and Verda Cox and Annie Vest; great Aunt Ruby; Nanny, Papa and Aunt Di; you all left too soon. Uncle Jar is a diehard Wolverine, a world-class freshwater angler and the best uncle anyone ever had. My brother, Brandon Vest, is a constant source of inspiration to me. If I could wring a tenth of the satisfaction from this life that he does I would be doing alright. Leave some smallmouth in the Appomattox for me, Brandon. My father, Robert Winfield Vest, has the biggest soul of anyone I have ever known, and I learned all the most important things in life watching him. It is to my mother, Patricia Keller, that I am most indebted for my achievements as a scholar and as a human being. For many years she made me sit at the kitchen table re-working botched homework assignments (usually math) until I got them right, exercises I attended to with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But this ritual also inured me to the long, lonely hours of the scholar and taught me the joy of a job well done. The patience and determination she inculcated in me has carried me over many an obstacle. !iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF TABLES viii ABSTRACT ix CHAPTERS Introduction 1 Vox Machinae 8 Chapter Outline 14 Terms 20 I. The Talking Machine 22 The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company 25 James Redpath and the Exhibition Royalty Scheme 31 Infrastructure Failure and Public Perceptions of Phonography 37 Infrastructure Failure and (Un)Profit 63 Conclusion 74 II. The Sonic Scribe 78 Sound as Text and the Business Phonograph 82 The Rebirth of the Phonograph 90 !v Phonographs, Gender and the Transformation of Office Labor 95 Infrastructure Failures and the Death of the Office Phonograph 109 Conclusion 127 III. The Sonic Printing Press 131 Coin Slot Machines 134 The Coin-Slot Phonograph and its Public 143 The Anxieties of Buying and Selling Sound 148 Recording 154 Selling Records 164 Consuming Records 170 Conclusion 177 IV: Victor 190 The Victor Talking Machine Company 192 Disappearing Infrastructure 195 Quality 211 Conclusion 222 V: Not a Machine 228 Building the Domestic Phonograph Infrastructure 232 Hiding the Domestic Phonograph Infrastructure 248 The Victrola 271 Conclusion 277 VI: Sonic Modernity 282 Records 286 From Cylinder Makers to Recording Stars 301 Both are Caruso 308 Conclusion 314 !vi Conclusion 324 BIBLIOGRAPHY 333 !vii LIST OF TABLES TABLE 6.1. National Phonograph Company Weekly Shipments of [Duplicate] Cylinders 290 290 6.2. Annual Production of Disc and Cylinder Records in the U.S. (millions) 296 296 !viii ABSTRACT In late 1877 Thomas Edison cobbled together a crude mechanism of metal and wood he called the “phonograph,” a device capable of mechanically reproducing sounds as varied as speech and birdsong. The scientific community and the general public hailed Edison’s invention as a wonder of the age and speculated endlessly on the practical applications to which it would soon be put. But as Edison and his financial backers discovered, making money from sound recording was no easy task. “Vox Machinae” draws on business records, newspapers, trade journals and advertisements to detail the first five decades of the business of sound recording. It begins with the technology’s origins as a staged spectacle in the 1870s before detailing its application to office work in the 1880s and 1890s. Following an examination of the nickel-in-slot phonograph parlors of the 1890s it explores the technology’s evolution as a form of “home entertainment” in the twentieth century. “Vox Machinae” argues, first, that each of these business models was an historical artifact produced by a give-and-take between phonograph entrepreneurs, the public and sometimes-intransigent material things. The story of twentieth century music is not only one of race, class, gender, taste, capitalism and consumption. It is also one of motors, batteries and hand-cranks and it involves production and distribution no less than consumption and meaning- making. Secondly, this dissertation argues that the search for a profitable business model also enlisted phonograph entrepreneurs and the public in a project of determining exactly what kind !ix of things phonographs and recorded sounds were. Did the phonograph represent a “talking machine” in the European and American tradition of the speaking automaton? Was it a “sound writer,” inscribing spoken messages on sheets of foil and then reading these scripts aloud? Or did one’s phonographs and records serve as frictionless conduits, channeling the actual singing, playing, preaching, and joking of distant (or even deceased) subjects? Sound recording technology was not a stable entity to be packaged and sold to the public. Rather it represented an ontologically-fluid cluster of material, cultural and social relations requiring that those who wished to sell it must first determine what it was. “Vox Machinae” complicates the existing historiography of recorded sound in two ways. First, it draws insights from Science, Technology and Society as well as the “new materialism” to show how the materiality of sound recording technology shaped its commercial evolution. Rather than a blank slate on which to project commercial ambitions, the phonograph presented would-be entrepreneurs with a tightly entangled set of commercial, material, social and cultural “problems” to solve. Secondly, it seeks to bring together the nuance of recent cultural histories with an older interpretive rubric—that of the “culture industry.” In so doing, it lays bare the tight relationship between production and consumption, without succumbing to the totalizing, historically “flat” conception of the recording industry offered by Theodor Adorno and other mass culture critics. !x INTRODUCTION If she grew bored with the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall a visitor to Philadelphia’s historic city center in 1919 might have walked a few blocks, caught a ferry across the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey, and there, right at the water’s edge, seen something remarkable— the industrial plant of the Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey. It was a sprawling complex of buildings, comprising 1,663,552 square feet of floor space and around a dozen-and-a-half buildings of various sizes. Its lumber yards—sixteen acres worth—were stacked twenty to fifty feet high with wood of various kinds which disappeared into the complex’s buildings at a rate of over 36 million feet a year. Ships plying the Delaware River delivered coal to a depot right at the water’s edge. From there it was lifted by a crane onto a conveyor belt and elevated to storage bins at the top of the complex’s power plant which yearly consumed 55,000 tons of the black, sooty fuel. 1 If our bored tourist found her curiosity piqued by these sights (and if she “knew someone,”) she might arrange a tour of the plant’s interior, beginning with Building 2, the executive offices. Her tour guide would almost certainly want to tarry in the building’s marble lobby, its wainscoted boardrooms, or perhaps one of its lavishly outfitted executive offices. These spaces were built, in part, for public consumption and projected Victor’s aspirations as a 1 Frederick O. Barnum, III. His Master’s Voice In America. Ninety Years of Communications Pioneering and Progress: Victor Talking Machine Company, Radio Corporation of America, General Electric Company (Boston: General Electric Co, 1991), 51-53, 75.