ABSTRACT
In 1878, Thomas Edison demonstrated the first phonograph, an invention that was literally a by-product of his work on telephones and telegraphs. Recorded sound was still an anomaly in a nineteenth-century media landscape dominated by print, and no one really knew what was the practical use of a machine that could endlessly repeat recorded sounds, voices, and music. In the early 1890s, Edison drew up a list of ten potential uses of the phonograph: from “letter writing without the aid of a stenographer” to a “family record of voices,” and from an “instrument for the preservation of languages” to the “reproduction of recorded music” (Sterne, 2005, p. 202). For a while, it remained unclear whether the phonograph was going to be a one-way listening device or a two-way communication device, as both potentialities were inscribed in the machine's original design. Lisa Gitelman (2006, p. 58–59) eloquently describes how the “talking machine” or “speaking phonograph” finally crystallized as a read-only amusement device. Around 1910, the phonograph had stabilized as a technology, and recorded sound had become the first non-print mass medium. For the phonograph, the decades between 1878 and 1910 were the years of what social constructivists Pinch and Bijker (1987) have called “interpretative flexibility:” a period in which a technology is still in flux and is open to a variety of competitive uses before it gradually stabilizes in terms of routine use and consolidated design.
