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Thomas Edison signed letter highlighting his "Loud Speaking Telephone"
Thomas Edison signed letter highlighting his "Loud Speaking Telephone"
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Description:

Edison Thomas

Single page autographed letter signed on New Jersey and Pennsylvania Concentrating Works letterhead, 8" x 10.5". Signed by Thomas Edison as "Edison". Undated. Light toning at top and bottom margins, usual mail folds. Light soiling at corners, small areas of professional restoration, and mounting remnants on verso, else fine.

An excellent letter, probably to Frank L. Perry, who was a journalist for the "Western Electrician", a periodical devoted to the latest news in the field of electrical engineering. Edison recommended that he see his "Loud Speaking Telephone" in a contemporary work on electricity. Shown below in full:

"F.L.P.

See "Loud Speaking Telephone" in Prescotts work on Elec and other works of telephony. The apparatus is not only useful for telephones but for other things it has no "self induction" and would record alternating waves absolutely true up to 100 000 per second

Yours

Edison".

Edison refers to the works of George B. Prescott (1830-1894), an American electrical engineer who wrote several books about the history of electricity, including "Electricity and the Electric Telegraph"(New York, 1877) and "The Speaking Telephone, Talking Phonograph and Other Novelties"(New York, 1878), in which he mentions of the "Loud Speaking Telephone." After the invention of the telephone, Edison was in competition with Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), and he was looking to produce a telephone receiver that would rival Bell's. It is likely that this letter dates from as early as December 1888, when the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Concentrating Works was established. In 1879, Edison invented a new telephone receiver, with a carbon-button transmitter and an electromotograph receiver that would be dubbed "The Edison Loud Speaking Telephone."

Per the Thomas Edison papers, at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, in 1879 Edison developed a new receiver to compete with Bell's. By the end of the year American Bell had acquired Western Union's telephone business and Edison's new receiver found its primary market in Great Britain. Edison's new receiver was based on his 1874 discovery of the electromotograph principle—a change in friction caused by electrochemical decomposition. In the spring of 1877 Edison had devised a telephone receiver employing this principle in which the varying electric signal made the sounding diaphragm vibrate by changing the friction between a metallic contact arm and a chemically treated moving surface. In the final version the surface was a chalk composition. He then revived the idea in June 1878 in an effort to get around Alexander Graham Bell's basic patent on an electromagnetic telephone receiver. Edison sent the first demonstration models to London in February 1879, and by July, he had developed a commercial design. The telephones sent to Britain combined both the carbon-button transmitter and electromotograph receiver.

Edison called his 1877 receiver a musical telephone because it was loud enough to broadcast music sent by his carbon-button telephone transmitter throughout a large auditorium. After the new instruments arrived in London in 1879, Edison's agent began calling them "The Edison Loud-Speaking Telephone." After the Bell and Edison telephone interests merged in Britain in 1881, the Bell receiver was retained because it was cheaper and easier to use.

The first district exchange was published in St. Louis in July, 1878. However it was not until more than a year afterwards that London had an exchange organized in 1879 noting: "Telephonic intercommunication on a practical working scale has at length become an accomplished fact in the City of London as was demonstrated on Saturday last by means of the Edison loud-speaking telephone to a number of scientific gentleman and others … It was for long past been well known that this method of communication is extensively practiced in the United States where the system has taken firm root."

This outstanding ALS ties the early references from Prescott's work in which Prescott reflects on Ben Franklin, up to Edison's most recent invention. It is really quite inspiring to see who quickly science progressed from the kite flying days of Ben Franklin:

"When Franklin drew from the clouds the electric spark upon the cord of his kite, it seemed obvious that electricity might be made use of for the purpose of telegraphy and more than one hundred years ago Lesage established telegraph in Geneva by the use of frictional electricity. But this force had very little power when transmitted over long distance, and that little was practically uncontrollable, and therefore useless for telegraphy. When galvanism was discovered, at the beginning of the present century, and the voltaic battery invented, it was at once supposed that this new form of electricity might work tele graph, and ten years later the chemical telegraph was invented by Coxe, in Philadelphia. Under this system, the two wires from galvanic battery were made to approach each other in cell of water. When the galvanic circuit was closed, the water between the opposite poles, which were near each other, was decomposed, and bubble of hydrogen rose to the surface, as the bubble from champagne does in the wine cup; and the observer, seeing it, knew that current was passing, and that the bubble was the signal. But it was evanescent …"

The Speaking Telephone, recent American invention, which at the present moment is exciting the wonder and admiration of the civilized world, is device for transmitting to distance, over an electric circuit, and accurately reproducing at any desired place, various kinds of sounds, including those of the human voice. The function of the telephone is analogous to that of speaking tube capable of almost infinite extension, through which conversation may be carried on as readily as with per sons in the same room. …"

And fast forward to today, where we all carry a cell phone with interconnectivity that could never have been imagined just 140 years ago.

A lovely ALS representing an important stepping stone of scientific history.

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