Beschreibung:

An Historically Important Jukebox Forerunner by the Inventor of Magnetic Recording, Oberlin Smith (1840–1926), c. 1924 Oberlin Smith and the Genus of Magnetic Recording: Oberlin Smith was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, but spent most of his adult life in Bridgeport, New Jersey, where he established a business designing dies and presses. The Ferracute Machine Co., incorporated in 1877, built presses for hundreds of metal products from artillery shells to the first commercial oil cans, stamping out components for Packards, Winchester rifles and Kodak cameras. Through his work, Smith came into contact with inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell – In 1877 Thomas Edison gave the first public demonstration of his tinfoil phonograph for recording and reproducing sound mechanically. Smith travelled to Edison's laboratory to see and hear the device in person. – Smith was disturbed by the scratching noises and by the limited length of the recording medium. Less than a year later, he filed two improvements to the phonograph and a provisional description of an electrical phonograph with the Cumberland County Clerk in a memorandum dated 23rd September 1878 and on 4th October 1878 filed a caveat at the United States Patent Office. – The first of improvement was to record phonograph signals on a long wire stored on reels, enabling extended pieces of music to be recorded. The second was to store the sound as a magnetic signal on a silk or cotton thread impregnated with metal powder. – According to Smith, his form of magnetic recording would produce "a perfect record of the sound, far more delicate that the indentations in the tin-foil of the mechanical phonograph". Smith continued to experiment with magnetic recordings over the next decade, publishing his ideas in an article titled "Some Possible Forms of Phonograph" in the influential "Electrical World" journal on 8th September 1888. – Despite Smith's prior work in the field, the Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen (1869–1942) was credited as the first person to achieve magnetic sound recording with operational, mass-produced equipment. Poulsen filed a patent for a "method of recording and reproducing sound or signals" by "magnetically exciting paramagnetic bodies" on 8th July 1899. The patent was granted on 13 November 1900 and unveiled to the public with a recording of Kaiser Franz Joseph's voice at the Paris Exposition of the same year. – Poulsen certainly knew of Smith's work as the 1888 article from "Electrical World" was cited during the patent grant procedure, however Smith received no public credit from Poulsen. Smith reacted to Poulsen's omission by laying retrospective claim to the invention of magnetic recording in an application to U.S. Commissioner of Patents in Washington in November 1900. However, as he head filed only a caveat (and not a patent) in 1878, his claim was not taken seriously. – Not only did Smith's work raise the idea of a recording telephone, it also paved the way for developments in universal magnetic storage of sound, images and data still in use more than one hundred years later. Without Smith, much of today's magnetic recording technology – from the hard-drive to the magnetic strips of credit cards – would not have been possible. Smith's Last Invention: The Autofono – "All You Do is Listen …" Despite his disappointments in the field of magnetic recording, Smith did not give up his experiments with magnetic technology. On 29th December 1921, Smith filed a patent application for an "Automatic Phonograph". – "The main object of my invention is to reduce to the minimum the manual labor or effort required in the operation of phonographs and other instruments of entertainment ... Another object is to enable the application of the sound record ... by the manipulation of a controlling device, such as a keyboard, situated more or less remote from the instrument." – The patent was finally granted on 16th February 1926 and a second patent for an improved ve