Chris Dickman (bio)

When as a young man in post-war Japan Yoshiro Nakamata came up with a new approach to reading and writing data, he patented it. A wise move, given that his invention would form the foundation of the floppy disk, as developed many years later by IBM. While this was one of his earliest inventions, Nakamanta has not rested on his laurels and is still cranking out ideas of every conceivable variety— now 3,218 and counting.

The key to Nakamata's long and prodigious career, which recently included a Nobel Prize for Nutrition, has been the protection of his intellectual property. Alas, things were tougher in the 19th century, when research was often simply appropriated, given a commercial spin and patented, to the detriment of the original inventor. None was more adept at the intellectual property game as it was then played than Thomas Edison, who had an undeniable gift for taking credit for other people's work, coupled with an implacable approach to business.

Perhaps best known is the length to which he went to convince the American public that his low-voltage DC electricity was superior to the competing high-voltage AC current of George Westinghouse. Beyond publicly staging electrocutions of animals with AC voltage to demonstrate its danger (including a circus elephant!), Edison played a key role in ensuring that the newly-developed electric chair used AC, again to scare the daylights out of people.

I can't resist one more Edison anecdote. Despite being invented by the Lumière brothers (why not watch the first movie ever made, shot in 1895?) Edison claimed moving pictures as yet another of his offspring and wasn't shy about hindering the success of competing systems and movie creators. George Méliès, a former French stage magician turned director, was one of the first geniuses of the nascent movie business. Méliès put everything he had into creating one of the first motion picture epics, his famous A Trip to the Moon. Initial showings went over well but he counted on extensive projections in the US to recoup the huge investment he had made in the film. It appears that Edison's agents bribed a theater owner to acquire a print, from which he made hundreds of copies for projecting the film extensively in the US prior to Méliè. With no public for his film, this aggressive pirating contributed to Méliès bankruptcy. He later becoming a toy salesman in a train station and was powerless to keep the celloid prints of hundreds of his pictures from being melted down by the French government to make bootheels for soldiers during the First World War. That's show biz!

Another of Edison's victims was also French, but last week history finally paid Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville his due. In the 1850's, Scott was actively exploring the capabilities of his phonautograph to record sound (shown above) by scratching smoke-covered paper. He duly deposited a patent application for the device with the French patent office in the late 50's, as well as phonautograms to support the application. Edison and his crew were well aware of the work and performed many phonautograph experiments of their own, eventually coming up with the phonograph in 1877 and laying claim as the inventor of sound recording.

And that would be that, except for the diligent work of the good people of FirstSounds.org, who in researching the history of phonautographs came across those ancient, smoke-covered recordings of Scott's and thanks to sophisticated reconstruction techniques actually managed to play them back. One was made public last week for the first time, a haunting voice singing a snippet of the French popular tune Au Clair de la Lune. Imagine, a voice from 1860, smokily coming to us through all the intervening decades. A poetic revenge indeed for Édouard-Léo Scott de Martinville, the true inventor of recorded sound.

Chris Dickman
Graphics.com | Also blogging on Photos.com