14

SOME OLD GRAMOPHONE RECORDS

  78'S BEFORE THE 1920'S

Common gramophone records from 1900 to 1950
 were playing at a speed of 78 rpm (revolutions per minute). 

They were made of a black shellac resin and had a diameter of 25 or 30 cm.  

Two sided records became the norm after 1910.

Some years ago however I found a few antique single sided records. 

Engraved on their reverse side was no music, but a picture:

 The Gramophone Co trademark. 

The "Recording Angel" was registered trade mark in 1899. 

The inventor E. Berliner in USA however asked his contractor VICTOR the supplier of clock-work machines and recordings  to introduce the picture "His Masters Voice" on their records. That was a few years earlier than HMV became the final and greatest trade mark in Europe.

Common popular music was often delivered in simple flimsy paper covers with no information but the sales company or store.

The shellac material was furthermore very easily torn to pieces if not handled with care. 

Some said that the labels in those days looked like tombstones with their golden letters on a black background. But among all the companies that were established before the 1920's, many labels were decorated with colourful pictures. 

With a few exceptions the sound was not that colourful.  The "microphone" still was just a horn connected to the engraving machine. The range of sound frequency was limited. Recording studios however made a lot of inventions to enhance the sound quality. 

                        Self portrait of Enrico Caruso in the recording studio.

The acoustic gramophone of the time soon developed to an instrument of precision.

When records were handled with greatest care and the stylus had a correct tip diameter and angle, the music started to be taken seriously.

Music lovers among upper-class people could afford the latest model. They were familiar to opera and the most celebrated tenor in the world: 
                                     

ENRICO CARUSO THE FIRST GRAMOPHONE STAR.  

Apart from being an opera singer, he was a very intelligent man.
He knew exactly how to make the best of the early recording technology. 
His mix of barytone and tenor sound did fit the narrow frequency range perfectly.

The fact that he was an excellent caricaturist shows a great deal of humour too. As the superstar at Metropolitan Opera house for 18 seasons, he loved USA. Born in Naples 1873 he died in New Jersey 1920.

The branch of recordings was multinational. So matrixes made in USA were  distributed to affiliated companies. This one was recorded in 1914 by Victor but pressed in Germany. 

Oddly enough it is single-sided. Maybe it was the last shipment due to the beginning off WWI. During the war in 1917 Caruso recorded the soldier's song "Over there" and helped selling war bonds in USA. That might not have been popular in Germany then.                    

I found this strange record many years ago at a car boot sale in Copenhagen. 

Maybe it had something to do with the First World War too.
Written in Danish it says "His Enemies Voice" 
The message is clear enough. But I still think, that the picture was clever and very funny.





These antique gramophone records have no value any more. The music has now been taken care of by institutions, restored to digital enjoyable files. A lot of them are available on the net for free. 

13.

PARIS 1922

CINEMATOGRAPHY AS ART

 This ingenious and odd artefact was far from a toy. The Pathé Co had been dominating professional film production before WWI. Selling short excerpts from feature movies provided a new form of advertising. This very first simple home film projector for 9.5 mm film had a lot of outstanding new and clever design solutions.

 The artistic logo plate on the rear side is a proof from the well known factory of high quality cinema equipment. The rooster was their trade mark for many years. 

                              

The film size 9.5 mm kept film material costs down. Perforation in the centre increased the space of picture area. It was bigger and brighter than the 8 mm format films introduced by Kodak 10 years later. 

The lab could make three 9.5 mm copies simultaneously on the professional 35 mm film stock. The vast Pathé Co had gathered resources and technical skills to go their own way and avoid patent infringements.

 The very small cartridges though held only about 18 m of film. But among other clever inventions, the projector had a new gizmo to enhance the duration of the performances. 
 Thanks to the low volt lamp and non-flammable film base every text frame could be brought to stand still. The tiny notch at the edge of the film caused a mechanical sensor mechanism releasing the film-transport for ten seconds.
Ideal during the time, when silent movies was depending 
on several dialog texts. 
 9, 5 mm format survived and end got refined for decades. Cameras were made by many other companies too. One of them was Eumig in Austria. 

            The Pathé Brothers had started their carrier in sound recording.   

I am very impressed by these two entrepreneurs. 

They dominated the French market in phonograph and film market for years. Starting by making recordings on cylinders and later on disc records, they used revolutionary new production methods. Cylinders were dubbed from high speed large-diameter master cylinders with a smart kind of mechanical panto-graph. 

  Another relic from 1906 compared to a standard 78 rpm, was a marvel of ingenuity. Using the same type of masters, the grooves were cut vertically rather than horizontally. So special record Pathé players had to be used. They were played at 100 rpm, starting from the centre of the record. The stylus was a round sapphire that didn't wear out. Depending on the recorded material, the diameter could vary from 21.6 to 50.8 cm!

  All these new inventions resulted in a considerable improved sound quality in those days.

12.

 THE BLACK CLOTH

This big and expensive Thornton Picard camera once belonged to a nobleman nearby, who took photography very serious. It was a semi-professional field view camera for glass plate negatives. Still in the early 1920's it was high tech. The excellent Euryplan lens made by Schulze & Billerbeck in Berlin was a precursor to most modern lenses.

Thornton's own time-controlled roller blind (curtain) shutter of opaque rubberized fabric had a very good reputation. The sensitiveness of glass plates had increased considerably over the years. This "Time and instantaneous"- shutter driven by a spring motor had to be wound up before use. Then it operated on the same principle as an old fashion window blind, but with speeds down to 1/80 sec.

Upside down? Yes the "display" worked that way in those days. A simple optic principle.
To examine the scenery on the ground glass, the lens had to be opened to its widest aperture. But still the image was not very bright. So you had to cover the edges and your head with a black cloth to eliminate all unwanted rear light sources. That made it possible to adjust focus correctly and compose the picture.

Then the ground glass would be turned up. It was replaced by a large wooden box containing the light sensitive glass plate. Well into the adjusted dark camera the lid of the plate magazine was drawn out and the sensitive plate could be exposed.

Note the comparison to the size of an A4 sheet of paper underneath  this negative! After developing this glass negative you could make perfect photographic copies on contact paper.  The picture size was not less than 18x24 cm and might fit an entire side of a normal book.

Books with pictures of foreign places were popular in those days before today's communications had been developed. 

11.

COLOURFUL PLASTIC TOYS WITH OLD ANCESTORS

 Pop camera from 1997.

It came as a bonus in a package of confectionery from by Pingvin

    Lakrids, Denmark.

  PINGO was a fictional character  from the animated comedy         children TV series Pingu.

100 years earlier

a skilled designer Frank Brownell was asked by Eastman Kodak to design "The cheapest camera in the world" 1$. It had to be so simple, that a child could use it. 
As seen on this old bookmark scrap he succeeded. 

It got the name BROWNIE from a comic strip character. He was as well-known all over the world as 50 years later Disney's Donald Duck & Co.

     "Candid Camera" was a TV series that had nothing to do with the picture above though.    

       To be quite candid I doubt that this Candy Camera would tempt young children in these days.

Launched in 1959 was an adult-figured toy fashion-doll. It was called Barbie. 

Enormously popular by young girls it inspired the producers to an immense number of accessories. 

Among the vast number of Barbie branded goods of all sorts was this real 35 mm camera.

    

In 1966 GAF New Jersey US bought the View-Master factory. They initiated a cheaper mass-production and sold it as a toy mostly for fairy-tales and animated characters.

The book about Heidi was written by Johanna Spyri in 1880. It got popular on film (with Shirley Temple) already 1937. Dozens of TV productions were made and continued into the new century.





GAF in Belgium even made a simple plastic projector in the late 1960's. Though this grey model looked confidence-inspiring, it was just a cheap toy that lacked the joy of 3D-experience. The projected pictures became simply two- dimensional pictures of dubious quality.

Far better was this toy Episcope from Markes & Co, Germany about 1960. It displayed opaque materials by powerful lamp lighting on the object from above. Mirror and lens projected the images of book pages, printed photographs, etc. In the early 1900's, similar devices were used in lecture halls at high schools and universities as predecessors to video projectors.

  

Four sequentially operated lenses for fun filled shots. They were cheap novelty toys then. Their designs often had a tempting appeal.

It reminds me of the first patented experimental moviecamera by Louis Le Prince in Leeds UK 1888. But that far too complicated machine contained not less than 16 lenses.

Cheap plastic optical toy called Zoetrope can still be seen as an educational souvenir from a museum-shop. The printed paper strip with animated images is mounted into the drum. While turning it around the slots are acting as shutters . Looking through one of the slots the images appears to be moving. 

This was a novel invention by W G Horner in UK 1833.

Another forerunner to movies became a toy from mid 1950. I have got the gramophone record, but just a picture of the faceted mirror. It would have been attached to the top of the gramophone spindle and reflected animated living pictures while playing the music. 

Originally that kind of "Magic Mirror" was called Praxinoscope and invented 1877 by C E Renaud in France.

A camera that speaks for itself.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles talking camera ca 1990. It talks two seconds before the picture is taken.   The sentence coming out from the camera has been translated to me by the younger generation: 

"COWABUNGA! (= It’s an actor’s dream) SMILE!” 

The Turtle character originated from songs, comic books and TV programs and  since at least 1947.

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.