ABSTRACT
British instrument maker and inventor. In 1879 he began working with Alexander Graham Bell in a research facility in Washington, D.C., and in 1881 he was invited by Bell to join him and Chichester Bell in the formation of the Volta Laboratory Association. The purpose of Volta was to carry out acoustical and electrical research. Tainter was probably responsible for the emphasis on developing a talking machine that would improve on Edison’s tinfoil phonograph. He applied the principle of engraving into wax as early as 1881, and created a demonstration cylinder that was sealed in the Smithsonian Institution; the record-presenting the voice of Alexander Graham Bellwas apparently played for the first time in public, at the Smithsonian, in 1937; documentation of the event is not positive. Tainter eventually filed, on 27 June 1885, a patent application (U.S. #341,214; granted 4 May 1886) for his method of “recording and reproducing speech and other sounds.” His application specified that the recording surface was solid beeswax and paraffin, and that the signal vibrations were inscribed vertically (hill and dale); but the word cylinder did not appear. Another patent application, for a machine with a removable wax-coated cardboard cylinder, was filed on 4 Dec 1885 (U.S. patent #341,288; granted 4 May 1886). The instrument he developed came to be called the Graphophone, giving its name to the new organization established in 1886 by him and the Bells: Volta Graphophone Co.
