A BETTER LIFE - The Collectors
Interview of Collectors
A BETTER LIFE - The Collectors
Unveiling Edison, The Man behind the Phonograph: Part 1 of My Conversation with Jack Stanley
Thomas Edison’s legacy goes beyond the light bulb; his phonograph changed the landscape of music and entertainment. This episode explores Edison's innovations, theatrical approach to invention, and the enduring impact of his work on sound recording.
• Edison's multifaceted personality as an inventor and showman
• The importance of phonographs in cultural history
• Comical misadventures in early sound recording technology
• The evolution of sound recording formats and techniques
• The phonograph's enduring legacy and its emotional connection across generations
The first words I spoke in the original pornograph, a little piece of practical poetry. Mary had a little lamb. Its feet were quite as slow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.
Speaker 3:Hello everyone and welcome to the inaugural episode of A Better Life. The Collectors and some of you that have been listening to A Better Life, new York my other podcasts have heard that we routinely do podcasts regarding collections mostly antique photographs and ancient music and how the recording industry started and all about these collectors. In our inaugural episode here we are lucky and blessed to have Jack Stanley with us, who is a historian on not only music but also phonographs. He worked at Menlo Park. He was a historical interpreter.
Speaker 3:He spoke a lot and hopefully he's going to give us some great insights into Thomas' life as he was as a lot, and hopefully he's going to give us some great insights into Thomas' life as it was as a human, his ideas and things. He's had many interactions with very famous people regarding Edison and recording, but I'll leave the floor up to him and he's going to start off telling us about Edison. I appreciate you being here today, jay.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. I appreciate being here as well. Glad to see you up and moving again.
Speaker 3:This has been set for about two months and I've been sick with 50 different things, so I apologize.
Speaker 2:It's worth waiting for. We'll have some fun and talk about Thomas. When I always talked about Thomas Edison years ago I used to say I like to put the Thomas back in Edison. We think of Edison but we have an image. It's almost like this cardboard cutout. That is Thomas Edison.
Speaker 2:But he was a fascinating individual and multifaceted, love theater, loved to act and put a lot of theater and entertainment into his inventing prowess. If you notice, most inventors are very cloistered and don't want to get in front of the public. Edison reveled in it when he introduced the phonograph. Let's start right there in 1877. That was on 6th of December 1877. The next day he's on the train to New York City and he goes to the offices of Scientific American with the tinfoil machine with a pre-recorded message.
Speaker 2:We went to the editor of Scientific American, plopped the phonograph on his desk and, as he said, I smiled at the editor and turned the crank. The phonograph introduced itself to the editor, asked the editor's health, told the editor it was feeling fine and bid the editor a fond good day. After the editor got back up on his chair. After listening to that, he did what Edison expected. He wrote about it and this is very important because the invention of the phonograph is what causes Edison to be called the wizard. Sometimes people think it's the light bulb. No, it's the phonograph. And the phonograph is perhaps Edison's most original invention and throughout his life he never can quite tear himself away from it and he refers to it as my baby and his baby did him good.
Speaker 3:That's what we remember him for. Mostly we do think of the light bulb. Even when you watch the movie, you see them hovering over the light bulb. Yes, but the phonograph is different.
Speaker 2:The phonograph was a major. He was involved in so many different industries as well. We think of the phonograph because that's something that's near and dear to our hearts, but for a while he was involved in lighting by 1894, he's done with it and he's out of it. He's involved in cement. He's involved in storage batteries, he's involved in business machines, electric vehicles. He dabbled with electric trains and lots of other little things that were parts of his industry. But the storage battery, cement and the business machine were the big money makers for many years for him.
Speaker 2:And film, yes indeed, film had its moments with him Early on. It was good. They did the first talking pictures, which were quite good actually. But there was a problem with them and it's a little comical actually because it's the sound kinetograph I think they called. It was connected with twine that went from the phonograph to the camera and it turned out that mice had a wonderful appetite for the twine and they were always attacking it and unfortunately so often it would break or it would get dislodged in its timing. And they had a demonstration film where they had a woman singing and a dog barking and invariably it would be reversed and you'd have the woman come out and she'd start barking and the dog would start singing, which everybody was laughing like crazy. But it wasn't supposed to be comedy.
Speaker 3:You're right, he must have been losing his mind.
Speaker 2:And they got out of it eventually in early 20s, I think somewhere around there. But talking pictures just didn't quite last. Not to the Vitaphone stuff with Warner Brothers. Here's Ringer.
Speaker 3:I remember 10 years ago I used to drive a truck and NBC was one of our fans and Fort Lee Film was where they kept the image of all the old films. It was their warehouse and that was one of his old studios. It had the special windows on the top to follow the sun, to produce the light. It really was quite a sight to be in. I don't even know if the building's still there it's probably been torn down by now and it was full of old movies and the original cans and I used to just wander around in there and see a lot of silent films those were very valuable around in there and see a lot of silent films.
Speaker 2:Those were very valuable. Yes, Sadly, the nitrate films eat themselves alive in a sense or unfortunately catch fire.
Speaker 3:And when you look at a silent film like Birth of the Nation, that was a very controversial film when they edited films for content by the censors. They believed there were no original copies of what it actually looked like when it was originally filmed, because every copy is different. Very interesting how things worked in those days.
Speaker 2:Who knows what's left. I think about 15% of all the early films exist. When they first started doing film, you had to copyright each frame. At the Library of Congress they had reams of photos of film. The photos which were kept at the library were copied, put back together and there's your film. That's the only reason a lot of them exist, because of the copyright films, which is an interesting thing we don't ever think of. That's why some of the really early stuff from the 1890s exists, more so than the teens really early stuff from the 1890s exists, more so than the teens.
Speaker 3:I know Wyatt had posted something today with one of the silent film stars on it, sitting on a train. I don't remember exactly who it was, but I have a collection of silent films, not the actual films, but in a recorded way. I find them amazing and they're out there to be watched on some of these services. They're a whole collection of silent films and there were many made because back in the day in Hollywood it didn't take much to make them. They all ran around and filmed it, right, emote.
Speaker 2:Emote. Exactly you talk about the train. It might have been Buster Keaton I think it was Buster.
Speaker 3:I think it was Buster Keaton with the train the General.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Phenomenal movie.
Speaker 3:He really is. I get a Twilight Zone in the original Twilight Zone where he comes forward in time and he doesn't play himself but he plays somebody from that era and I found it interesting because they used this great silent film star to play the part. Back to Edison for a minute. So, edison, he's born in 1847, right? Yes, and that time period it's pre-Civil War, where the world's changing. He's born in Ohio and then years later the family moves to Michigan Right, you hear those stories Takes it to the newspaper, the Grand Trunk Railway, and he's selling candy, newspapers and something else which is interesting.
Speaker 2:Oh, he's an entrepreneur, absolutely the interesting thing in this part of his life, which Edison once again, we have to always remember that theater is a major part of Thomas Edison he would find dramatic moments and create dramatic moments that would affect his life. He had so many stories about his hearing loss that he got boxed on the ear, he got pulled on the ear. He suffered from mastoid trouble, which is the fusing of the bones of the inner ear. It was hereditary. Charles Edison had hearing loss too, and no one boxed him on the ear or pulled him on the ear. It was just hereditary.
Speaker 3:And that was his brother or his father.
Speaker 2:Charles. Charles was his son, charles the governor. Yes, you always see a picture of him. You'll see the wire running down to his pocket for his hearing aid.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing about Edison is that he could hear well in certain situations and not too well in others, but he almost always heard when you were talking about him. And he wrote a note to his doctor, which I found was so telling. He said to be a little deaf and to be the only one that knows exactly how deaf you are has its advantages. That tells us a lot about Edison. He used the hearing loss. It was a wonderful prop and it was also good. Stick In theater, stick is everything.
Speaker 2:And of course, as he got older with the mastoid trouble, he had two operations on his mastoid. They were terrible, by the way, because operations in those days was basically like taking a hammer and trying to break the bones apart. He was worse each time he had the operations. We know what he could hear because he designed a hearing aid to compensate for his father's hearing loss.
Speaker 2:He took his father to Bell Labs and had a curve made of his hearing. With that curve he designed a machine that his father could use and he said this was a monstrous thing with tubes and all kinds of stuff and it had a stethoscope on top and a microphone that you would talk into and you'd hear. He said that's what the kind of sound you'd get and he said his father would put his head into it and he could hear pretty good. He said but where the hell are you going to go with this monstrous? It just never went anywhere. And Edison said actually at that time I don't want people to know I can hear better. If my wife knows I can hear better, she'll make me go to church with her.
Speaker 3:It's funny how you would think that we look back at now. Edison himself chose most of who picking what artists and singers and bands and even songs are going to hear for the rest of us to listen to.
Speaker 2:I've always wondered about that. I went through tons of his reviews on records. I went through thousands of them. He would listen to every one of the recordings and then write down what he thought of it. Sometimes we can't even mention how he described them. He had an interesting way of saying things. Whoever taught this person to sing should be put over a wheelbarrow and beaten with a board Stuff like that. And he would send this stuff to the corporate office. They would dutifully type it up and he said past, but oh, this record gives me a pain in the ass. Or he'd sit there and say if the Germans like this kind of music, they would love botulism. And that's the kind of stuff he would do. He would get raunchy at times. He would say that a singer had dingleberries on their vocal cords, but this all went to the corporate office.
Speaker 2:That's so funny, he didn't really care. This was his company, this was his plaything, this was his pulpit, this was everything. This was him and you were there for the ride. And people forget that sometimes, that this wasn't a company that had a board of directors and stuff like that. This was Thomas Edison's laboratory and his company and he was the boss, he was the dictator, he was the king, he was the executioner.
Speaker 3:He was everything, His first product that he sold was it a repeater?
Speaker 2:for the first thing he ever developed, never was made into anything was a vote recorder.
Speaker 3:He sold, I think, to.
Speaker 2:Western Union. He did the quadruplex telegraph.
Speaker 3:That's what it was One did the quadruplex telegraph.
Speaker 2:That's one of the early things. He sold four messages at the same time on the same wire. Pretty incredible. They did the telegraph repeater. I believe it had a disc and it would take indentations One of the things that leads to the phonograph actually.
Speaker 3:And is that the one he sold for $30,000 or something that gave him the money to build his first lab?
Speaker 2:I think that was more like the stock ticker. He sold the stock ticker. He was selling stuff to various companies that were competitors to Jeff what.
Speaker 3:He ends up selling these inventions and it finances and he basically blows through the money because he builds a building in Newark and then he makes it into one of his laboratories. He basically spends every dollar he has and now he needs.
Speaker 2:He always would take the money he made and invest it in new ideas.
Speaker 2:And sometimes they went belly up, which wasn't good. Probably the greatest disaster for Edison was after the light bulb in the lighting industry. He was dead set on DC and Edison. General Electric was not totally pleased with that and they eventually forced him out and they changed their name to General Electric and they give him lots of stock and he sells all of the stock, takes all of that money and invests it in iron ore mining and builds this massive facility in Sparta, new Jersey, because there was no place where you could get concentrated iron ore and he said this will be perfect for the steel industry. He built these huge towers with magnets, bullies and all kinds of stuff. The rocks would be dropped, pulled and go down chutes. It was Rube Goldberg at his best, that kind of thing. He finally got the whole thing set and working. As soon as they did that, they discovered the Mesaba Range which was nothing but concentrated iron, and Edison read that and said this will close up shop, and they did. Years later he went up there with his driver and he looked in one of the pits and said I threw $3 million down this pit and it hasn't hit bottom yet. That's funny.
Speaker 2:He always found a way to make a joke out of most things. He always had jokes. He always found a way to make a joke out of most things. He always had jokes and he loved to tell stories and play parts when reporters would come to see him. When he was young he was constantly doing everything and bouncing all over the place and hardly sleeping.
Speaker 2:When he was 65 years of age, it was a very different story. It was a very different story, but probably right around the age of 65, around 1912, thomas Edison the man and Thomas Edison the myth make a big walk and go in separate directions. The myth works constantly, hardly ever sleeps. However, the man is quite a bit different and he would meet the press and, of course, when he would meet the press he would play the myth. I talked to a fellow years ago and he discussed that in Edison's desk he kept a jar of dirt and I said what was the dirt for? He said Edison would be at his desk in his jacket and be working on something and they say Mr Edison, the press is here. He'd open up the jar, get some dirt, mix himself up a little bit and then he would meet the press. Beautiful, magnificent theater. Theater is the one thing that is never mentioned.
Speaker 3:Thomas said he was an interesting human being and listen, we're still talking about him, right? Still, there isn't a time. Just, I just bought a um Edison home machine which I needed like a hole in the head, but I I thought it looked nice. When you open it up and look at the mechanism and you say to yourself how could this be so complex and so simple all at the same time? How is it that here we are, 120 years later and it's still with a little cleaning and a little oil, and maybe we replace one gear that it's going to run like a coffee and they all do?
Speaker 2:It's amazing when you think about it. Edison hired some really magnificent people. That's the one thing that I watch on the internet. We see so often that Edison stole everything from Tesla and just all this other absolute nonsense. People forget the fact that Thomas Edison is 60 people.
Speaker 2:It's a company and he's the creator, more or less, of organized research. He gets the best people at doing mathematics and the best people at doing and also he would throw in some very different people at times. He would bring people in and do an interview with them and they say what are you? He said I am a scientist and he said that's wonderful, I'm going to put you in the woodworking department. He said I don't know anything about woodworking. He said that's perfect and he going to put you in the woodworking department. He said I don't know anything about woodworking. He said that's perfect and he'd do the same thing to a woodworker and he'd say I know nothing about science. He said that's fine. I got a whole bunch of people telling me this can't be done. Maybe you'll touch something and it'll work. And he encouraged people to experiment and there was some explosions here and there and there were some problems, but the whole thing is that he always was willing to try something that had never been tried before.
Speaker 2:Tesla himself is the individual who told the story that if you know applied science, you can look at the straw, the pile of hay and straw and know exactly where that needle is. With Edison, he will pull out one straw at a time and maybe find five needles. That was his method. It's not a very economical method, but that was his method and he found lots of things. Or, as Edison liked to say, I start here and I plan to go here, but when I reach here I discover something else and I go there. That was Edison basically describing his scientific method. It was very simple, basic.
Speaker 3:Sometimes the simplest things are the most profound when you think about it 1877, they do the prototype, or the original, so-called referred to us always the cruci prototype, because he was one of the other geniuses that could build things oh yeah, and then, and then there's a couple other prototypes afterwards, right and then, but as far as making the for the public, that doesn't take place till much later. Is he motivated by others that are also building things in the marketplace? Is that his motivation at that time?
Speaker 2:He was definitely inspired to improve what others had done. One of the people that comes to mind is Alexander Graham Bell. Bell was trying to find a way to record sound. Edison was trying to find a way to communicate via wires. Each invented what the other wanted to do and each would never forgive the other for doing it. There was a mutual form of hatred between the two of them. As soon as the telephone came out, he made the announcement and said when you use Mr Bell's apparatus you have to go talk to the person you spoke to and tell them what you said, basically saying it doesn't work very good.
Speaker 2:One of the first things they work on is the telephone mouthpiece, the carbon button transmitter Right, and he works very much on that.
Speaker 2:That's one of the things also that leads to the phonograph and of course once he develops it he sells it to Bill's competitor Just to endear himself a little more. Edison lets the phonograph sit while he's busy with the lighting situation and Bill gets Charles Tainter to work with him and Chick Chester Bell, his cousin, and they develop the graphophone which is phonographed, spronerized, and they developed their cylinders that were little corncob kind of things, and they also make their first recording which is on a altered tinfoil machine. Actually, they put wax in the grooves and they did Shakespeare instead of a nursery rhyme, because they thought a nursery rhyme was just a little too juvenile. There are more things in heaven and earth, horatio. That was what they were saying on the tinfoil. Edison is pissed off over what Bell does and Bell is pissed off with what Bell does and Bell is pissed off with what Edison does. If you ever notice, there aren't photographs of the two of them together. An interesting thing. Edison will hold a grudge, and he will hold a grudge for a lifetime on some people.
Speaker 3:It's funny. So then you go to the phonograph and he starts making these two-minute cylinders and early home models and things progress. You get the standards on and on Somewhere along move into the four-minute cylinders. Now were they in response to the 78s, these discs becoming more and more popular.
Speaker 2:There was a lot going on when you just had brown wax cylinders. They were doing about 120 RPMs and you had a three-minute cylinder but the sound quality wasn't so good. The concert cylinders, those big monstrous things, did 160 RPMs and their fidelity was better. Once the molded cylinder came out in 1902, they standardized it at 160 RPMs, which would give you a two-minute record. They were all fine and happy with that. The 10-inch record was maybe a few seconds longer than two minutes, right, so it was pretty much the same. The sound quality was better on the cylinders but the volume could be greatly enhanced on the disc. Everything was fine until the 12-inch record came out.
Speaker 2:Then you had a record that could last four, four and a half minutes, maybe even, if you push it, five. That led to the four-minute cylinder, which was metallic wax, as they called it. It was very brittle. That's the one thing you still hear from lots of collectors, that the four-minute wax are just quite brittle. I break them all the time. Yeah, they have a tendency.
Speaker 2:And there was an advertisement. In fact it was in the fabulous phonograph. They talked about how the four-minute wax record was made, that the vats were there and then out of his office, mr Edison will walk with a brown paper bag and drop the contents into the vat. All our investigation refuses to allow us to know what that mystery is. They pushed this whole thing. It was Mr Edison's magic mix.
Speaker 2:The four-minute records gave you more time. It was a smaller groove and you're still having a lot of weight on a smaller groove. They wore out quicker and that was a big problem. Between 1908 and 1912, that period of that four-minute wax cylinder was the period where the fortunes of the Edison cylinder went down. Had he perhaps found a way to use celluloid earlier and created a blue-amber old cylinder, let's say in 1908, that might have had a much different effect because the sound quality was incredible. But by 1912, you had double-sided records and there was no way you could put a double side on a cylinder. The only way you could lengthen it is lengthen it, and that would become stupor. Even Edison finally went to the disk, even though he hated the disk.
Speaker 3:He did make it his own though.
Speaker 2:Yes, that was very Edisonic.
Speaker 3:I have a newspaper ad that is framed where I have some of my phonographs, and he is with a diamond disc on it and one of his laboratory machines. He's in a room with state teachers in Albany and thousands of teachers there and he has to give them this demonstration, to show them that his phonograph, to show him that his phonograph and you hear the stories of he had behind the curtain he would have the original person playing and a recording and then he would go back and forth and show that his phonograph was as good as live. Now you hear those stories. I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, the tone tests, as they called them, and they used to do tone test performances all over the place, and a lot of them were done like during the time of World War I, right, when the diamond disc was frighteningly bad Because they didn't have a lot of the chemicals, because the chemicals came from Germany, right To make their records, and so they were harsh sounding and scratchy. But nonetheless, what they did with those tone tests is the records that they used on the machine were not standard issued records. They were specially made and heavily lacquered so they would be positively silent and they were made to be played once or twice and then thrown away, and this is what they would use in the tone test. But there's another thing that a phonograph is never going to be able to sing like a person. What you have to do is train the person that a phonograph is never going to be able to sing like a person, right. What you have to do is train the person to sing like a phonograph Only Edison would think of that and they would never sing full voice.
Speaker 2:They would sit down and sing like the phonograph, and in a theater it's hard to tell because you have echoes and resonance and they fill the stage with flowers and pictures to distract you. It's show business and these performances were very good. Theodore Edison went to one and he said he had a hard time telling. Now we also have to remember people's ears were very different in 1920. They weren't as trained right, they were not. We listen to that stuff today and say of course I can tell we're not. We listen to that stuff today and say of course I can tell. But we have to understand that those folks had never heard anything like what we hear and so it was a lot easier to do the bait and switch trick Right? Not people were convinced and a lot of phonographs and records were sold because of it.
Speaker 3:You don't think about it. They didn't have the trained ear who really listened to opera. No one that wasn't hanging out in Carnegie Hall was hearing an opera singer. Right, it's maybe in Italy or maybe somewhere else, but not in America. So I play those discs now I don't know if I have any Caruso that's in Cylinder, but I don't think he was an Edison recorder. I play those and of course he does Because he worked for the other team.
Speaker 2:This is Paul. Edison had a tremolo, he didn't like vibrato. And he read right and says caruso's developing a big tremolo, no good. And I watched this to somebody else and says this son of a bitch, he's got caruso's skin once again. I went to the office, of course it did.
Speaker 3:It's funny because I have one of those. I bring my Victor VV50. I have one of the early ones with the crank and throw it on there for people to listen and it's amazing. First of all, the VV50 sounds amazing for that type of phonograph. There's not much to it but it sounds amazing and those recordings are great.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I recorded for a company. Their studios had that sentence. It's a certain kind of sharpness that they put onto the record and in Italian in vocal singing there's something called basically to sing. It's something called basically to say it's the score of a page and it's high ringing quality. You got that with the Victor Records and that drove Edison nuts and he would listen to a disc and he said it sounds like a Victor record, a company called Phonotypia and they were a lot of operatic stuff and Edison said this song should be soaked in lime.
Speaker 3:Went to the office. I think the Columbias sound better than the Victors, but that's just my personal preference.
Speaker 2:The Columbians did have a very interesting thing they did tests at the Edison Lab. That makes me of things. That's why I bring them up.
Speaker 2:They did tests to find out. First off they did wire tests. They wanted to find out how well their diamond disk would hold out. And they would carry this pretty kid and say, take this victim record and play it a hundred times, change the handle each time. We're going to see how much wire there is. And you look under the microscope before they started and then after the 100th place and it was considerable the, where they found something very fascinating the Victor and Columbia records. And saying that the Columbia records held up much better than the Victor, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:So that's an interesting thing. It is not the Victor Columbia, but that was the Edison experiment and I found that the Edison, the Columbia record, held up much better. I put in a Columbia record I've had for 45 years and I've played it. I must have played it 400 times. It's a song for a month and the thing still sounds good, you don't play them on antique machines though.
Speaker 2:I saw you play them About 25 years. I played them. Okay, I'll give you that it was played by the Stenlito, by me. It's pretty amazing. It held up very well. The fidelity is good. As I said, I just put it on and it's really quite an amazing sound.
Speaker 2:But Edison also another thing just to mention to you. Edison almost had the chance to get a controlling interest in the Columbia Company. Columbia had lots of issues. They were always a day late and a dollar short with many things. And 1910, 1911, edison was offered controlling interest in the Columbia Phonograph Company. Had he gone for it he would have had a controlling interest in the disc market and the cylinder market because they were the only people making cylinders per se. You had the indestructibles but they were small time compared to Edison and Columbia. But he said no. And of course also he would play Victor machines. He would play Columbia machines to listen and compare and he would just say that they were rotten. He didn't like the sound that came from the steel needle. He said with a diamond needle it's a smoother sound and it wasn't cutting as a steel needle might be, because in a sense if you think about it it's like a nail.
Speaker 3:What's funny is the diamond disc reproducers. Most of them are tall. They don't really diminish the price today because they're difficult to ship and difficult to move. I have a few, but I have an A100, which isn't that big and it's easy to move. I have the B80 that's in back of me, then I have a shallow Shall's in back of me that I have a shallow kind of machine.
Speaker 3:It's amazing yeah, I mean it really works pretty well. I didn't expect it to. It's interesting the way it totally works differently. I saw it in auction recently in an upstate, New York, in the middle of nowhere, and they had two phonographs. They had that and a tabletop Sonora and I bought them both. I think it was the end of summer. I had never had a B80 before and it just looked. It has the original mohair in front of the speaker. That's great.
Speaker 2:I'm ashamed of the B great, it's a tank.
Speaker 3:The chalet is of any diamond there's two. The chalet is no party, it's a 60 and 80 same horn, so heavy.
Speaker 2:Interesting thing that came up. They came up with the diamond disc. They were thinking of doing a 12-inch but the spring on the B60 and the B80 was not enough to play a 12-inch diamond disc and that was one of the deciding factors on not going to 12-inch. Interesting Actually, if you think about it. The B60, the B80 were all archaic and out of date and every either Edison machine could easily play a 12-inch diamond disc. And I'm just saying I've done it. But I think probably production of a 12-inch is very difficult. 10-inch were difficult enough because you have the core and you've got the condensate outsides, which was all designed by James Ellsworth who is a chemist, and it had every kind of chemical that was a carcinogen you can think of. And while they were doing all their experiments Edison got signed. He was one of the first persons fined for pollution. We kind of finished off a whole little lake.
Speaker 3:Happens In those days. It happened a lot.
Speaker 2:Things just say their change goes out the window Absolutely and more things.
Speaker 3:I also have a C-150. I forget what the model's called, but it was refinished all over. When I got it, I brought it home and I put new life on it. The original finish was perfect. It came back to life beautifully. For you, yeah, and it looks like it just came out of the showroom. Really is an amazing finish on it and it sounds great the machines I have.
Speaker 2:I haven't seen the machines. I have a home.
Speaker 3:There's a fucker side later and a gym and then I have an Amber 5 and an Amber 75. The two machines I covet and the 75. I covet and the 75. I know I have a. I want a 5 with the cabinet and a 75. My friend who does some of these podcasts with me and Tracy, they just found a 75 and I saw it at his house and I was like, oh, you have to sell that to me. He goes no, tracy will kill me. I haven't got it. And then I see Brent has a beautiful one. It just looks fantastic. I've also seen original cabinets, something I never really thought about. But I was at John Duffy. I don't know if you've ever met him. He's the horn guy. He's a master of polishing and removing dents and if you've seen some of my horns, that looks brand new. He had like a machine shop in his basement. He is able to take all the out of a horn like it was brand new. Some of the really dented up brass ones. He's been able to do that. And then I just got some 42 inch horns he had as well. Yeah, I try not to say that I am new. I am probably.
Speaker 3:Years and years ago I went into an antique shop. I must have been in my 30s. I'm 60, gonna be 66, but I was in my 30s. I went into an antique shop and they had full collection of all these and cylinder machines, all restored, beautiful, and I was like I have to have one. It was thousands of dollars back then. My girlfriend was with me at the time absolutely not, you're not going to get one of these. So that was the edict that lasted.
Speaker 3:So about 18 months ago it was August of that last year, the year before I happened to see an auction that was in New Jersey, which is a great auction Handful of phonographs every once in a while. It was a standard B, I think and I bid $200 on it and nobody else bid on it and I got it. I brought it home and it played a little bit, but not great. I ended up meeting someone that repaired them, so I FaceTimed him. He goes, let me see. He goes, put a drop of oil right here and I put a drop of oil where he told me to go and the thing started playing. Amazing, I was hooked. Next came an Amarillo DX thing.
Speaker 3:I bid on it, forgot about it. I ended up getting it. So now I had those two things, and it went progressively downhill from there.
Speaker 2:I had lots of those two things and it went progressively downhill from there. What does this mean, stan? I had lots of machines years ago. I don't have that many now. I get so heavy and I'm getting older. It's an unfortunate combination, so I have to be careful. I have lighter machines. I don't have any huge Victors or anything anymore.
Speaker 3:The Amarillo 5 is no light piece of work. There it's right there. They're not very heavy. They don't have wheels on them.
Speaker 2:Well, I do have my 5. I bring it to the hybrid. I have a base from a Victor Victrola 12. I saw it, but I'm using Lee as number five. They didn't look perfectly together and these have been made for each other. The two makes the five look great. It's like a half-breed.
Speaker 3:I get it. I have a few cabinets, ones that were made for phonographs, but they're not made for any specific ones.
Speaker 3:I have a VV4 and then I have a big black horn. I was able to get a cabinet. I bought at different times. You would think they belonged together in a prior life. And then I have some others To me. The cabinets make it. Unfortunately that's a new revelation I have, but the cabinets make it. I enjoy the cabinets and I think there's going to be a point in time where I'm going to lessen the load a little bit. But I'll try to figure out which ones are going to sell. I really don't get it, because the ones that aren't worth that much money anyways, unless I find a collector or something that's just starting out. The VV4, the VV6, the whatever it is, the 8, then those are mahogany, it's all roman numerals. I have all those and they sit underneath. Unless I get a cabinet for them, they won't sit underneath any more phones. I have two that I really love, one's the rear mount and one's the front mount.
Speaker 3:Columbia, ah, really just is restored perfectly. The wood is beautiful, it sounds amazing. I have Victor that's too heavy to move, like you see, really nice. What else? And as far as Diamond Discs, I play them all. I don't know what model this Columbia is because it doesn't match any of the pictures, but that one sounds amazing. I love playing any gem gem, playing any fireside. I have a couple of homes. So I have a home model, the 42 inch horn that has a 20 inch bell on it, one that has seamless it's 42 inches, that's on a Columbia with interesting reproducer that looks like a Lyra and that sounds great too. All right, I have a bunch of those that were made over time the BK. I have a BQ, I have a BV, I don't have any A's, I don't have any A's and I don't have any C's.
Speaker 2:You're thinking the Columbia right, the Columbia testing machines.
Speaker 3:Is that the BK? No, the BK is a cylinder, an old-fashioned cylinder. There's two I have one smaller than the other ones, got the nickel-plated top and one has a black top.
Speaker 2:Okay, do you know?
Speaker 3:And then there's a whole bunch of those little ones that was. The eagle, the eagle, and then there's a Q or the Q's, the eagle and the B, I don't know. I get them confused from time to time because I don't play with them.
Speaker 2:I love them, yeah, but they. I get them confused from time to time because I don't play with them. I love them. There's so many different games, I couldn't remember them all. It's interesting. I think I told you about this. Actually, it's a premium. Yes, we talked about it. It was so early. I was looking up the evening. This is 634.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 2:Just to sit there and figure this out. I didn't know that the screen isn't working right. It was so funny. Feels like it's a little tight. I don't know if I should push it further or not. Maybe it hasn't been used enough. What is this?
Speaker 3:The person to talk to about that is Joe Yu Joe. You see him on Facebook. Send him a message. He does all my victors and him and Wyatt are really close friends, so anytime I have anything weird, wyatt jumps in. I just sent him a reproducer today, a diamond disc reproducer to evaluate he's quite a technician.
Speaker 3:He's our knowledge of things. We were at the Wayne Jersey and there was a box full of parts. He goes to the next. Oh, this is too. And he knows three obscure parts. I don't even know what the part is, what machine it goes to, but I don't claim to. Every time Brett tries to say listen, get yourself a two-minute home, they're simple and need some work, and start working on it. But then I said I ain't doing this, there's no way, no way. But, that's the way it is.
Speaker 2:They're fascinating things then, for audience entertaining. It's an interesting thing when you think about collecting. Yes, you can have old radios, but you can't get old stations with your radios, but with the sonograph you actually can. It's almost like it was a movie called Somewhere in Time Years ago about a fellow that dreamed and went back to 1912. Christopher Reeve. Yes, and I sense in recording you can share time with people. Think about it, you can share time with people.
Speaker 2:Think about it. You can share time with your great-grandparents and your great-grandchildren. You all can experience the same thing. It's really an amazing thing when you think about it. Not only this Exactly the same way. I'm exactly the same way. What I find very fascinating is that the emotion that is felt is going to be felt the same. You're going to say, oh, that's lovely or this is rotten.
Speaker 2:I was interested in people years ago. The most fancy of us will like today. I want to share with others. I love to share stuff with younger people. I'm going to be 68, and I've been fiddling with this stuff for half a century now. Right, and I can be collectors, helping them, teaching them and sharing knowledge, which I think is the most important thing. If you can inspire them like a fire, you get the coal kind of lit. A little bit it'll spread. And a young fellow contacted me and said I am starting to collect. And he said can you answer questions? And so I talked to him. I went to visit him, I bought him a care package records and said here, this will help you stuff up for this big, because he had 10 records and was so happy and he's looking to get another machine. The Zipis has been implanted.
Speaker 3:It's fun. I go to shows and see people Kids are there, finding things, fixing them and trying to sell them Some things they keep. I'll buy something from one of them and talk to them. Part of the idea of this podcast is that we're bringing it to a medium that younger people use. It isn't just talking on the society's Facebook page, it's a medium that others use. People can learn without being intimidated. Two years ago, when I started down this road, there were people that were very condescending To that.
Speaker 2:I agree I might never find you again. There's no place for that.
Speaker 3:I absolutely agree.
Speaker 2:You tempt the water by doing that and you might get to discourage people. My greatest complaint is on the field. Many things Many of us have learned. We've been talking to some great people and learned from them, but if you can start throwing attitude, that's just showing basic rudeness as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 3:And it's funny because when I decided that I would do a new channel of just collectors and others things will go through people that still play music from the time period and others but to a couple of collectors who have just two or three machines, I said I would like to do a podcast. Why would you want to do with us? Because you're a new collector. I want to hear about what your expectations are, what you've learned, what brought you here. I want to see your three machines. Who cares what anyone else thinks? Let's talk. I spent my whole life not caring what other people think. I'm not stopping now. The same, Hopefully. I'm going to do one show to collectors people that are getting involved, and that's going to tell the rest of us what people are interested in. Things change over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, young people and just young people, older folks that get involved. Younger folks, it doesn't mean what the age is, it's your interest and your willingness to learn. That's one of the great things. Is that? Because you look at this history, it's this wonderful history, fascinating stuff. And the great thing about sound recording is that it doesn't change. It is what it was and will remain what it was when we live on. It's the same. There's a few things like maybe movies, but even with movies it's hard to keep them. They kind of rock. But I would often show that 150 years from now, most machines will still be running. No train, except they're going to be. So true, it's an interesting thing to talk about.
Speaker 3:So when I talk to Wyatt, it goes on for hours.
Speaker 2:I love Wyatt. When he was very young early 20s I guess at the time and he was coming in and he came to visit, he said you know, I'm working on these new diaphragms and he's using cardboard and stuff like that. And I said, wow, that's great. I was so glad to see him doing this kind of stuff. And look where he's gone now Lots of other kids. This kid I've been talking to, he was interested in trying to do wax recording. I also used to try to find a way to make disc wax recording. So he wants to reinvent the wheel and he's in his 20s. It's wonderful. He's going to be around for a long time, sure, and I think he's going to have a profound influence on a lot of people in the future Doing stuff like this where we're talking and sharing ideas and thoughts and knowledge.
Speaker 2:I did this historic recording project, which is to recreate what Edison said for the photograph. He said I wanted to record the great voices of our time, and so what I did was I had my own thing. I did it without. I had the same tools as Edison, except he had more money than I did. I started writing letters and I finally got one person. It was Joe Franklin, a nice old Rondeo Intellivision star. He was the first person to make a cylinder, he had paintball and he talked to them. Eventually I had this whole network of people talking to each other. I was busy Every three weeks I was making a record. I was recording Walter Klunkite, peter Jennings meeting with Charles Osgood. I recorded President Ford, senator Dole. I was recording Walter Klunkite, peter Jennings meeting with Charles Osgood. I recorded President Ford, senator Dole. I was externe, the violinist Tom Hopkins and Celeste Holmes, an Academy Award winner.
Speaker 2:One of the first to make a cylinder, obviously come to think of it. I was the interim from a public event, the first man to walk on the moon that made a cylinder. I actually came to think of it. I actually did a syndrome from a public demon the first man to walk on the moon that made a cylinder. I thought that was fun and I actually sent the cylinder on the space shuttle.
Speaker 2:I was able to do a lot of this stuff and sharing enthusiasm. That's the secret, because if you don't have enthusiasm in what you do, you lose everything. We're starting again. Yep, okay, it was able to require Baz Aldrin, who was the first person to make a cylinder, who walked on the moon, which I thought was pretty cool, amazing, I don't think it's practical or older. And then they remembered the phonograph. I said now Ford, amazing. And he said that his grandparents had Edison machines and his parents had Victor machines. He said they were a little bit more modern, but it didn't matter where I was, I had to know. And I said, and I recorded him. We had a sing-along. He said let's have some Edison entertainment.
Speaker 2:And I put on by the Light of the Silvery Moon by Ada Jones with the quartet, and he started dancing around the room and he said let's all sing. And we sang together with the cylinder. That was probably one of the most fascinating moments I've ever experienced. It was a lot of fun Doing this project. What was cool about it is people forget who they are because they've done something they never did before and since they never did it before, they're having fun. President Ford just sat there and started talking about his father's paint store, working in a Hungarian restaurant and stuff like that. He talked about things he I might want to talk about because he was just relaxing and having a little bit of fun and that was a run-and-draw project. I won't let his taking that over. I see him with quotes.
Speaker 2:And he's doing all kinds of stuff and I love so many of the recordings. He's sharing them, he's making new ones, but he'll be doing that and hopefully in 20-some years he'll hand that over to somebody else to continue it, because that's a great project and it's a great thing to share with future generations so they can hear people on cylinder.
Speaker 3:It's like a time capsule.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is Very much. And the other thing that's so fascinating about making a wax recording is this the wax. It requires the power of the human being itself to make the record. That cylinder, which is the only thing of their voice, was called by the living being. It's basically the essence of that person, Right? The?
Speaker 3:energy of their voice is what moves the mechanism, the record is commanded by the power of that being themselves.
Speaker 2:It's loved on now. An interesting, mystical way to look at it. It's true, you can get to that person Right.
Speaker 3:You think of it I think that's a good place to end it for now. Okay. Sounds good and we'll do a subject for next. Okay, I appreciate your time. I appreciate you coming on and the wealth of your knowledge.
Speaker 2:I look forward to having you back. Okay, you fine, john as well. Bye.