10.

In a dark corner of my cellar I found this old music box

I have not looked inside it for decades. So my curiosity was great. How old is it and does it still work?

The spring motor, regulator and pick-up transportation was all right. Only the needles were gone.

Taking a closer look at the maker's plates ought to show a bit of the origin and age. 

All those patent dates do give quite a bit of interesting information.

  

The origin was a brainchild of Thomas A Edison’s in 1877. But the vast improvements in Charles Tainter and Chichester Bell’s patents from 1886 to 1897 were most important. Together these three gentlemen founded the North American Phonograph Co. Edison kept to his original idea of the phonograph as a dictating machine.  The subsidiary Columbia Co however got the rights to market it as a music machine with lots of entertaining cylinders.

   

An uncle of my fathers who owned this Graphophone managed to engrave a few songs on some of the wax cylinders in the 1920’s. Many years ago I took those short sound recordings to our National Library where they preserved them electronically. 

The brittle brown or black wax cylinders played for 2 minutes on this machine and were more or less worn out over time.

Edison’s last attempt to compete with Emile Berliner's Gramophone was the Blue Amberol as late as 1912. They were “indestructible” celluloid cylinders with twice the playing time. A new type of machine was introduced to fit the slower feeding of the pickup. The increasing development in high quality sound made the Amberolas popular for yet another decade.  

Already in 1901 the inventor of Gramophone records Emile Berliner had this huge hit with a recording of President McKinley's last public speech at the opening of the Buffalo Exposition September 6th 1901, the same day he was assassinated.

Several gramophone companies competed in the beginning of the century. Victor was one of them. This 7 inches copy of the record seems to be from 1904.

So in the long run the market for Phonograph Cylinders decreased. The flat gramophone records were easier to produce, store and handle. They became the future of acoustic sound recording. 

09.

SOME OLD 3D-VIEWERS 

The VIEW-MASTER was a novelty to me in the early 1950’s.

  

An aunt of mine brought this one as she returned from USA. It was souvenirs from places she had visited, like New York, Niagara Falls, California and Hawaii.

I bought this one with a built in source of light. Fed up by pictures like common view cards, I searched for other items. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II 1953 was one of them. One of the film stars I admired was Grace Kelly. My pictures of her wedding with prince Rainier of Monaco 1956 had more human presence in my view.

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.

I still remember the joy of my grandfather's  viewer called stereoscope in those days.

Oliver Wendell Holmes in US started making this stereoscope version. It was the most common type from 1881 to the 1930’s. He based it on an early patent by Sir Charles Wheatstone 1838.

                                               

This picture dated 1901 was made by Underwood & Underwood, the greatest publisher of stereo-graphic pictures. They claimed to deliver 25.000 of them a day in that period.

The first stereo cameras were in fact invented in the middle of the 19’th century. So the awakening interest in 3D pictures during the 1950's had its origin one hundred years ago. 

David Brewster’s viewer from 1849 was a bit more complicated. For non-transparent pictures a mirror lid was adjusted to reflect light onto them. The opaque glass at the back of the viewer let light to pass through glass or tissue paper photos. 

Arc de Triomphe in Paris France.

By adjusting the mirror on the lid to direct light on to the semi- transparent photo, you could experience the monument as seen in broad daylight.

By closing the top lid and use back-light on to the rear side with 

the opaque glass, the result got quite different. It became a very skillful colored night-view. Tiny pinholes represented the illumination sources.

This photo of Arc de Triomphe in Paris seems to be taken in the middle Ages, at least before 1900.

PARIS IN THE 1920'S

This elegant pocket size souvenir was a foldable viewer of high quality. 

Made in France by Unis folding Stereoscopes about 1925. The 3D slides are thin b/w films. 

Sawyers View Masters got a few competitors. Among them RO Mo Vick  and Standard  Click, both from France. In USA Sawyers got a rival called Tru - Vue, that had no success.

It was already in the New York Fair 1939 that Sawyers Portland , Origon US introduced the very first View-Master with proper Kodachrome pictures. Their success lasted for three decades.