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At The Dawn Of Recorded Sound, No One Cared
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoHe beat the more well-known inventor Thomas Edison by 20 years, though his accomplishments were only recognized over the last decade. Just another example of how being first or early, even in groundbreaking things, means you will probably not find success.
- accountyaccount 9y agoAs strange as it seems, all the French inventor cared about was seeing what sound looked like. >Just another example of how being first or early, even in groundbreaking things, means you will probably not find success. Well no, in this case the inventor of sound recording just had an entirely different goal.
- sixothree 9y agoAnd neither he nor anyone exposed to this idea were able to make the connection to playback ability. I do find that a bit surprising.
- subroutine 9y agoApparently Scott first had to convince people that sound came from vibrations. > Scott proved that vibrations are truly how sounds came to our ears. But Thompson says the scientific community had trouble accepting his breakthrough. So maybe it's not too surprising.
- WalterBright 9y agoAny violin/piano player already knew that.
- wutbrodo 9y agoI'm skeptical that they knew that vibrating air was what our ears perceived as sound. If you know a little about the history of science, there are tons of theories that held up for some time that are no less "ridiculous" to our eyes than some special medium moving through air that our ears process as sound. The fact that the _source_ of sound was known to vibrate doesn't exclude this possibility, and _that's_ what violin/piano players knew about (Sources of visible light often give off heat, but saying that light and heat are the same thing is not implied by that).
- WalterBright 9y agoSee my other reply to this topic, which is directly to your point.
- mikestew 9y agoScott's invention made pretty drawings on soot-covered paper. Edison's invention allowed one to play back recorded sound. Just another example of how novelty will not succeed in the face of actually useful inventions.
- logicallee 9y agoIt's the difference between an MVP and an MP. Just because it works, doesn't make it an M-V-P.
- cfmcdonald 9y agoThe phonautograph was a perfectly viable 'product', as a tool for investigating the physical properties of sound.
- logicallee 9y agoSo your confusion underscores my point: viable means that the marketplace wants and does buy it. i.e. it's enough of a product to to make sales and take off. If nobody is buying it (or for free models, using it), it's not an MVP. It's just a working product.
- chc 9y agoSo the V in MVP stands for "true Scotsman"?
- logicallee 9y agoSimilar. It is a mistake to say, "We made our MVP but nobody wanted it." That's a contradiction in terms. The minimum VIABLE product is the minimum thing that people do want, and are willing to pay for. That's what viable means. What do you think viable means? (Genuinely curious.)
- 9y ago
- hectorr 9y agoIf you want extrinsic rewards, you need to provide extrinsic value.
- ghaff 9y agoAnd after his initial work, Edison just sat on it for about 10 years until a competitor started to come along. At which point, he did some more work to make his own product marketable.
- graphitezepp 9y agoThe notion of not knowing why recording sound could be useful to me is hard to grasp as someone who has always been around it. It is extremely difficult to understand societies of the past.
- gosheroo 9y agoYes. Past attitudes were absurdly parochial. Half of Bach's manuscripts were lost. Writing was invented for tax purposes. Even natural selection sat on the genetic code for a billion years before branching out into multicellular life.
- greaterscope 9y agoYou made me lol. Thank you :-)
- gosheroo 9y agoFine! Most of the credit goes to Chapter 6 of David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity.
- coldtea 9y ago>Half of Bach's manuscripts were lost. So? How does that make "past attitudes" any more "absurdly parochial" than ours, since the vast majority could care less for Bach and classical music today? >Writing was invented for tax purposes. Well, taxes were invented to help build cities and defend them, so there's that.
- jacobolus 9y agoActually, some of the earliest writings we have (in Mesopotamia) are for managing beer production supply chains. Other early mathematical/written work was for taxes and debt records, but also recording business transactions, adjudicating land boundary disputes, managing subcontracted work quotas, and so on. Then later of course we get written legal codes, astronomical records, religious texts, satirical stories complaining about scribes’ incompetent and hypocritical bosses, personal letters, ...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- obastani 9y agoIs going from recording to playback a trivial step? The article doesn't make this clear, but if this step is nontrivial, then Edison's contribution still seems like a big deal. The article even seems to imply that the format he recorded the sound in was not amenable to playback.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 9y agoWe are getting back to that now. At the saturation limit of recorded sound, few care, and not to the degree it made it once a major and inescapable cultural force. Of course back then for a short window (50s to 70s and up to mid-nineties or so) music was expensive to buy, limited collection (needed mail order for exotic tastes and of course you could hardly sample them), the top 40 songs were heard by everyone and anyone because cars just had radio (some novelties aside), and there were few tv channels, no video, surely no YouTube, no internet, no social media, no mobile phones, no mobile apps, no (or very limited and primitive) video games, no VR, no cat videos, no memes, no reality style celebrities (you could get some gossip, but not 24/7 gossip), no Twitter, and so on. Popular music stood out as a unique way to have fun, escape, bond, etc then.
- afterburner 9y agoI wonder if the poor quality of the recording made it hard to see how it could be useful for music.
- digi_owl 9y agoThat, and the fiddly nature of the early equipment. Never mind that all you had for amplification was a bullhorn. For most commercial venues one already had resident musicians (keep in mind that as late as the 60s the Beatles worked as such in Germany before they hit it big). As the saying goes, don't shoot the pianist.
- fudged71 9y agoI'm reminded of 3D printing. The output today is generally shitty but the progress will lead towards something very important. Years ago I sent the first "3D fax" across the world. It felt remarkable, but it didnt pick up any attention.
- bdamm 9y agoIt's already revolutionizing aircraft and spacecraft construction. Where I work we have a small mechanical engineering team and they love popping prototype enclosures out of their 3D rig. Seems big already! With massive efficiency gains often comes generational leaps.
- ajdlinux 9y ago3D printing is a far cooler technology once you ignore the maker-community and the ridiculous claim that home 3D printing is going to completely revolutionise life for the majority of the population. Being able to 3D print a custom-patterned plastic cup is fun and all that, but the real game is stuff like 3D printing for industrial prototyping, medical applications, and so on.
- wutbrodo 9y agoHow is the tech cooler when you _remove_ from consideration one of its potential niches (even if it's a lesser one)? I don't buy the spectacular claim as expressed above either, but it's not beyond to me to think of how it could have a non-revolutionary but solid impact for personal consumers' lives at some point.
- psyc 9y agoThe interesting issue to me isn't the particulars of this one case. It's that when you invent something very novel, nobody cares because they can't anchor it in the scheme of things they already care about. Effectively, they can't "see" what you've done. Communicating the value of your invention can be very challenging.
- DaggerDagger 9y agoThat's basically the Inventor's Curse summed up as well as could ever be. "The inventor is always cursed to invent something that is just as difficult to explain as it is to invent."
- loader 9y agoThis is the value behind MAYA "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" pioneered by Raymond Loewy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Loewy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Loewy
- WalterBright 9y ago> He beat the more well-known inventor Thomas Edison by 20 years, de Martinville was forgotten because his device had no use, could not play back sound, he did nothing to improve it and he had little idea what to do with it. > There is no evidence that shows Edison knew about Scott's breakthrough when he stumbled onto sound recording. He did not "stumble" into it. Edison had a flash of inspiration and then designed a machine to implement it.
- hammock 9y ago>de Martinville was forgotten because his device had no use, could not play back sound, he did nothing to improve it and he had little idea what to do with it So it's like a seismograph for sound? Makes me wonder if there is a seismograph somewhere that can play back recordings :)
- theprop 9y agoThose of you flummoxed by this probably at some point have questioned why study the immune systems of bacteria (led to the biggest breakthrough of late, crispr) or number theory (led to all cryptography) or build an app to make photos disappear or other things that only later become obviously "useful".
- williamscales 9y agoYou had me until the bit about disappearing photos - that's not an innovation, anybody who has wanted to has always been able to make photos disappear after sending. It's a bit of a false equivalence to mention a twist on sending someone a photo in the same sentence as you mention such great research efforts as number theory and bacterial immunology.
- wutbrodo 9y agoI entertained the thought of how strange the article is, and yet I don't think I've ever felt that way about any of the innovations you're describing: in fact I may I'm probably a little too slavish in my trust of the direction our collective research infrastructure. That isn't to say I disagree with you in general though. Given where and when I was born relative to the article's setting, it's a lot more understanding that my baseline would be faith in the long-term wisdom of scientific progress.
- maxander 9y ago> "A sound separated from a sounding body was just sort of a conceptual leap," she says. "I'm not sure people had the cultural context to invent this stuff." It makes one wonder what currently isn't being invented simply because it doesn't fit into our conceptual framework. We have a somewhat more rich framework now than people did in the 19th century, of course, but the number of things we have to play with- computers, genomes, brain scans, rockets- has also gotten much larger and more complicated.
- EGreg 9y agoDark matter is the new ether, perhaps, waiting for its Einstein?
- ademarre 9y ago> It makes one wonder what currently isn't being invented simply because it doesn't fit into our conceptual framework. It's fun to think up thought exercises to try and help break out of our conceptual framework. On a smaller scale, an approach I've played around with is taking attributes of existing technologies that have certain things in common, then diagramming them in different ways and looking for holes. As a concrete example, let's go back to 2005. You might reason that e-mails and blog posts are both kinds of written messages, however blogs have an open audience, while e-mails are sent to specific recipients, so a closed audience. Separately, you might compare e-mails to text messages, and realize that they are very similar, but one is long form while the other is short form. You can draw this as a table: | short form | long form | -+------------+-----------+ open | ??? | blogs | -+------------+-----------| closed | SMS texts | e-mail | -+------------+-----------+ Now try to figure out what fits in the missing box (short form, open). It's Twitter! (Or even better, decentralized micro blogging.)
- Nition 9y agoHey I've got one of those: | Short-term discussion | Ongoing discussion | -+-----------------------+--------------------+ Admins create subforums | Digg/Old Reddit | Forums | -+-----------------------+--------------------| Users create subforums | Reddit | ??? | -+-----------------------+--------------------+
- dclowd9901 9y ago"Scott proved that vibrations are truly how sounds came to our ears. But Thompson says the scientific community had trouble accepting his breakthrough" Wat? How the hell did bell makers think bells worked?
- WalterBright 9y agoYeah, I don't believe that, either. Stringed instruments were commonplace, and the instrument makers pretty obviously knew how they worked.
- MBCook 9y agoJust guessing (I'd love to know the real reason): Just because we know the object vibrates when making sound doesn't mean we know that sound travels through the air as a bunch of vibrations. Or that are ear is picking up vibrations. Maybe they thought the vibrations were something like the heat given off from friction. Not necessarily the main thing, just a side effect. For all we knew maybe it could be some sort of "sound light" or magnetism like thing. Someone had to prove that it was vibrations all the way from the start to the end.
- WalterBright 9y agoLoud sounds make nearby things vibrate, which is easily felt. Even louder sounds, like cannon fire, had obvious concussions and visible shock waves, and you could feel the thump in your chest. A bell ringing will set up visible vibrations in a nearby cup of water. Instrument makers shaped sound in air boxes in violins, and shaped it in horns. Sound has obvious propagation delays through air. Maybe lay people had strange notions of sound, like flat earthers, but educated and observant people would know better. The evidence was all around, it did not need a lab experiment.
- SamReidHughes 9y agoAlso, human throats vibrate when speaking or humming. Drums, bells, triangles, and plucked string instruments have visible vibrations.