Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

The “Leisure Problem” at the Turn of the Century 153ments of mass instruction. In 1877, after Edison designed a machine thatrecorded and played back his own voice, his Edison Speaking PhonographCompany staged practical demonstrations that mainly aroused curiosityabout how the technology worked. With tinfoil wrapped around a cylinderand a stylus that indented the foil, the hand-cranked instrument reproducedspeeches and other sounds. During exhibitions, notable people in acrowd (e.g., the mayor) would come onstage, say a few words into a mouthpiece,and then listen in amazement, along with the audience, to the wordscoming back through a funnel. But interest in the exhibitions faded afterabout a year, and Edison began developing his incandescent light. Only afterAlexander Graham Bell and others in the early 1880s developed theirown recording machine—the graphophone—did Edison return to his phonograph,“my baby,” as he described it: “I expect it to grow up and be abig feller and support me in my old age.” Even then, however, he was interestedprimarily in how businesses might adapt it for stenographic purposes;it was, his company claimed, better at taking dictation than was a woman,who all too often got sick, thought about men, or wanted a raise. Otherentrepreneurs nevertheless turned to the phonograph as a source of entertainment.Some, such as Lyman Howe, charged ten-cent admissions to“concerts” where they used “horns” to project the sounds of recordings toaudiences composed largely, if the catalog advertisements were correct, ofrefined, well-to-do listeners. In 1889 in San Francisco, a company set uptwo slot machines through which, for a nickel, a customer could listen torecorded sounds. The successful venture soon attracted other businesses tothe field, including the Columbia Phonograph Company, which began torecord popular music. By the 1890s, “phonograph parlors,” containingcoin-operated phonographs, were joining the spreading ranks of commercialentertainments. 24Even after Edison grudgingly opened his own phonograph parlor inNew York City, his company and others that quickly dominated the recordingindustry (Columbia and the Victor Talking Machine Company)wanted to make their machines high-class instruments that middle- andupper-middle-class customers would buy and that would remove any stigmaof low culture. They thus launched major publicity campaigns on behalfof respectable music that reflected cultivated tastes and preferences. AtVictor, Eldridge Johnson designed a new record player, the Victrola, to producemusic “for the classes, not the masses,” as one trade publication contended.Unlike Edison’s machine, which used a wax cylinder, the Victrolaoperated with flat disks. According to a 1910 advertisement: “It representsall the Victor repertoire of high class music in an attractive setting. . . . Itappeals to the best class of people.” An ad two years later applauded theopportunity to listen to great music at “your summer home, your yacht,and out on your lawn.” Such advertisements typically portrayed expen-