Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 30112-h.htm or 30112-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30112/30112-h/30112-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30112/30112-h.zip) Transcriber's note: Passages in italics are enclosed between underscores (_italics_). Additional spacing after some of the quotations is intentional to indicate both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as presented in the original text. Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, United States National Museum Bulletin 218, Paper 5, (pages 69-79) DEVELOPMENT OF THE PHONOGRAPH AT ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL'S VOLTA LABORATORY LESLIE J. NEWVILLE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PHONOGRAPH AT ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL'S VOLTA LABORATORY by LESLIE J. NEWVILLE _The fame of Thomas A. Edison rests most securely on his genius for making practical application of the ideas of others. However, it was Alexander Graham Bell, long a Smithsonian Regent and friend of its third Secretary S. P. Langley, who, with his Volta Laboratory associates made practical the phonograph, which has been called Edison's most original invention._ THE AUTHOR: _Leslie J. Newville wrote this paper while he was attached to the office of the curator of Science and Technology in the Smithsonian Institution's United States National Museum._ The story of Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone has been told and retold. How he became involved in the difficult task of making practical phonograph records, and succeeded (in association with Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell), is not so well known. But material collected through the years by the U. S. National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution now makes clear how Bell and two associates took Edison's tinfoil machine and made it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax. Preserved at the Smithsonian are some 20 pieces of experimental apparatus, including a number of complete machines. Their first experimental machine was sealed in a box and deposited in the Smithsonian archives in 1881. The others were delivered by Alexander Graham Bell to the National Museum in two lots in 1915 and 1922. Bell was an old man by this time, busy with his aeronautical experiments in Nova Scotia. It was not until 1947, however, that the Museum received the key to the experimental "Graphophones," as they were called to differentiate them from the Edison machine. In that year Mrs. Laura F. Tainter donated to the Museum 10 bound notebooks, along with Tainter's unpublished autobiography.[1] This material describes in detail the strange machines and even stranger experiments which led in 1886 to a greatly improved phonograph.