Thanks to Hollywood, whenever I think of a Dictaphone, my imagination immediately jumps to a mid-20th-century office, Don Draper suavely seated at his desk, voicing ad copy into a desktop machine. A perfectly coiffed woman from the secretarial pool then takes the recordings and neatly types them up, with carbon copies of course.
I had no idea the Dictaphone actually had its roots in the 19th century and a rivalry between two early tech giants: Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. And although it took decades to take hold in the modern office, it found novel uses in other fields.
Who invented the Dictaphone?
The Dictaphone was born from the competition and the cooperation of Bell and Edison and their capable teams of researchers. In 1877, Edison had introduced the phonograph, which he later declared his favorite invention. And yet he wasn’t quite certain about its commercial applications. Initially, he thought it might be good for recording telephone messages. Then he began to imagine other uses: a mechanical stenographer for businessmen, a notetaker for students, an elocution instructor, a talking book for the blind. The playback of recorded music—the phonograph’s eventual killer app—was No. 4 on Edison’s list. And after a few public demonstrations, he set aside the invention to pursue other interests.
Thomas Edison’s early phonograph from 1877 used a needle to record sound waves on a rotating cylinder wrapped with tinfoil. Thomas Edison National Historical Park/National Park Service/U.S. Department of the Interior
Enter Bell. In 1880, the French government had awarded Bell the Volta Prize and 50,000 francs (about US $10,000 at the time) for his invention of the telephone. The following year, he, his cousin Chichester A. Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter used the prize money to found the Volta Laboratory Association in Washington, D.C., to do research on sound recording and transmission.
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Tainter saw potential in the phonograph. Edison’s version used a needle to etch sound waves on a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a metal cylinder. The foil was easily damaged, the sound quality was distorted and squeaky, and the cylinder could be replayed only a few times before degrading and becoming inaudible. Edison’s phonograph couldn’t be easily commercialized, in other words.
Chichester Bell and Tainter greatly improved the sound quality by replacing the tinfoil with wax-coated cardboard cylinders. By 1886, the researchers at Volta Lab had a patented product: the Graphophone.
Two colleagues of Alexander Graham Bell refined Edison’s phonograph in the 1880s to create the Graphophone, which used wax-coated cardboard cylinders rather than tinfoil. Universal History Archive/Getty Images
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