How Thomas Edison Changed Communication

Eccentric—some would say opportunistic—inventor Thomas Alva Edison gave the world a lot. The Wizard of Menlo Park had over a thousand patents to his name (most of them dealing with small improvements upon the same device) and gifted society with the light bulb (which, the apocryphal saying goes, he got right after getting the design wrong the previous thousand times) and his persistent feud with the equally-great Nikola Tesla—but that story has been written about plenty of times before, so it's not worthy of being discussed here.

While most well-known as the inventor of the incandescent light bulb, Edison went on to claim patents for minor improvements to the telegraph (200 patents); phonograph and telephone (100 patents); and electric lighting and electrical power distribution (200 hundred patents). By the time of his death, the great inventor's patent list officially numbered 1,093.

Scores of books have been published on how much of a genius Edison was, but what about his actual inventions? Of course everyone has heard of the light bulb story so many times that by now many of us can recite it by heart, by fewer people know that he developed the world's first commercially viable phonograph, or that almost 130 years of movie magic wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for Edison and Dickinson's Kinetoscope.

Out of the thousand-odd patents credited to Edison, four are arguably the most important with relation to the field of communications—his improvement on the automatic telegraph, development of the carbon telephone transmitter (which occurred the same year the telephone was invented), and inventions of the tinfoil phonograph and movie camera.

Improving on the Automatic Telegraph

We tend to think of Morse code now as being that thing that's only useful in survival situations and the occasional coded message used on generic procedural cop dramas, but Samuel Morse's telegraph not only put message riders out of work by enabling messages to be sent without physically carrying them, but also made the landscape a bit more unsightly with the erection of telegraph lines all over the countryside.

By the time Edison came on the scene, the automatic telegraph had long replaced the hand operator of Morse's day; whereas a good human telegraph operator could crank out 25 to 40 words per minute if he were efficient, the ink-recording automatic telegraphs that were introduced in England doubled the output to anywhere from 60 to 120 words per minute. When he worked on improving the automatic telegraph between 1870 and 1874, Edison switched the recording system from ink to a chemical base; changed to a metal stylus; and developed an updated perforator (the device that makes the actual dots and dashes on ticker tape). The result was an astounding increase in the volume of words per minute that could be spit out—500 to 1,000.

Edison also tried his hand at making an automatic telegraph that sent and received messages using Roman letters, but it unsurprisingly never took off.

The Carbon Telephone Transmitter

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the world's first telephone in 1876, it ushered in a communications revolution; sure, the telegraph was still en vogue, but the arrival of a device that people could use to actually talk with each other made the telegraph's use as a normal communications device obsolete practically overnight.

Bell's telephone was a wonder to be sure, but it had a problem—the magnet that was used in it wasn't strong enough to sustain the electrical current going through it, which meant that the range at which people could use it effectively was severely limited. Edison went to work on improving it soon after it was unveiled and found the issue to be that there wasn't any resistance going against the magnet; this coupled with the fact that the magnet was weak to begin with meant that a person's voice would get softer the further away they were. To overcome this deficiency, Edison put a battery directly on the current line itself so that the current would hold its charge; and also placed a small amount of lampblack carbon underneath the transmitter's diaphragm—as the speaker talked, the current would interact with the resisted carbon and their voice would be continually amplified. Problem solved.

Further improvements on the transmitter were made in 1885 when Edison switched lampblack carbon with roasted anthracite coal granules; the system was in use for the next 100-odd years until the introduction of the digital telephone in the early 1980s.

The Tinfoil Phonograph

At the same time he was working on a way to improve on Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, Edison happened upon a curious idea in July 1877—since it was now possible to hear another person across great distances, wouldn't it also be possible to record their voice as well? After writing that "[t]here's no doubt that I shall be able to store up & reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly", Edison and machinist John Kruesi built the world's first recording device in December 1877. Cranking the contraption by hand (which turned a grooved cylinder fitted on a long shaft), Edison's first recorded words were the lyrics to the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

While the scientific and technical communities—and the public at-large—were amazed by the phonograph due to its simplicity (and the scientific community began using the phonograph to study the new field of acoustics), its introduction was also met with some skepticism; one professor wrote Edison to complain that his "idea of a talking machine [is] ridiculous." The phonograph's invention eventually led to us recording ourselves singing like nobody's listening, so you be the judge.

The Movie Camera

If you're a person who's watched television or been to a movie at all in your life, give thanks to Thomas Edison (and RCA while you're at it). Without him, we'd never get to experience the Marvel movies, or watched our favorite television characters get killed off (looking at you, George R. R. Martin).

Actually, you should really be thanking Eadward Muybridge because he was the one that got Edison started on the path in the first place. After attending a lecture featuring Muybridge and his zoopraxiscope (a weird contraption that simulated moving animals), Edison became interested in "motion pictures" and wanted to design "an instrument that does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." While his first design was literally a series of photographs on a cylinder that were turned while looking through a microscope, Edison and his photographer William Kennedy-Laurie Dickinson finally got it right in 1892 when they invented the Kinetoscope, a motion picture camera attached with a peephole.

Edison never got into the movie business after that, but at least we can reap the benefits.

About the Author: Ronald Hamilton, Jr. is a graduate of Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Media Studies. When he's not writing for COM-GAP, Ronald is a volunteer with the nonprofit Live Forever Project.