Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1931-11)

November 1931, Vol. VI, No. 2 23 waves were sound w T aves. So the machine talked. In other words, the membrane executed the work, first of the human ear, and then of the human voice. It vibrated to the air waves of sound and transmitted them by means of the needle to the tinfoil on the cylinder, and then it oscillated in obedience to the fluctuating motion of the needle along the indented lines. It was very difficult to remove the tinfoil from the cylinder, or to replace it without distorting the material and injuring the indentations. This difficulty necessitated in the fitting of a separate cylinder and to crank for every “record.” Moreover, the revolu- tions of the cylinder were very erratic. Owing to this defect Edison lost interest in his invention. Graham Bell, however, saw what possibilities lay in this instrument that his rival had discarded. He improved the crude ideas of Edison and produced a machine called a graphophone. By instituting a clockwork motor in lieu of the former hand motion, it resulted in the record and reproduction of sound being much steadier, and in- stead of tinfoil he employed a thin mixture of wax on light paper cylinders. By this time another inventor, Emile Berliner, be- gan to show interest in these two talking-machines, and discovered where both instruments possessed a common defect. So in 1887 he invented the gramo- phone. Externally the chief difference between the latter and former machines was that the records were much handier in shape. Consisting of thin flat discs and made of wax with worm-like or grooved surface, they occupied less room than the original cylinder ones. Moreover, the mechanism for driving the gramophone was far simpler. A single movement of the turntable spun the disc round, which by means of its grooved surface propelled the needle across it. Whereas with the phonograph, first the cylinder had to be turned round, and then while it was turning, a secondary motion had to be imparted to the needle to send it along the revolving cylinder. Berliner saw that both Edison and Bell were at fault in adopting the “hill and dale” method of recording sound. For the needle, often jumped from the top of one “hill” to another, missing the “dales,” with the result that a noise was produced instead of a sound. However, he obviated this by inventing an entirely different “cut,” so that the depth of the grooves in the record was always the same. The walls of the tiny lane running around each disc were quite level, and the waves were cut out of the sides of the minute walls. So instead of the needle having an up and down movement it worked forward from side to side. Undoubtedly the phonograph has accomplished for the musical world what the invention of printing has done for the world of literature. By engaging the world’s greatest artists to record for us it has—to borrow the words of a famous writer—“put the loveliest and most spiritual of arts within reach of everybody and has preserved and im- mortalised the most fugitive and glorious of all the activities of man.” Reminiscences of "Harry Macdonough" By ULYSSES J. WALSH J OHN S. MacDONALD, who died of a heart seizure at his home in New York on Sep- tember 26, was a man who lived a “full life” if ever a man did. Both in his early activities as a recording artist and during his later days as a laboratory director he achieved a career of which anyone might well be proud. But it is one of the disadvantages of living a “full life” that it seldom affords one sufficient leis- ure for setting down to paper all he has seen and done. It is highly unlikely that Mr. Mac- donald ever found it possible to write the autobiography which we should have liked to have from his hand; but he did find time, in the course of a friendly correspondence, to tell me a great many interesting things about himself and his work, which I have decided to chronicle here. Mostly, this story of the life of “Harry Macdonough” will be given in his own terse, often humorous, words; and I be- lieve that his pen pictures of the “elder days” of the recording art will be found interesting and informative to the majority of readers of The Phonograph Monthly Review, few of whom perhaps have any idea how familiar the name of Harry Macdonough was upon record labels a quarter of a century and more ago. J. S. Macdonald was born sixty-three years ago. It is interesting and odd that he as well as Henry Burr (Harry H. McClaskey), who was his only possible rival for the honor of being the most popular singer of sentimental ballads of their time, were both Canadians, of Scotch descent, and had voices which were re- markably similar. As a young man Mac- donald took up church singing but never ap- peared in concert or upon the stage, and with the exception of a very slight recording ex- perience this was the sum of his musical career when, in October, 1898, at the age of thirty, he found himself in West Orange, N. J., where the Edison Company was busily en- gaged in turning out cylinders. Prior to his Edison engagement, all the records he had made had been for the Michigan Electric Company in Detroit. “These records,” he