gramophone

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Thomas Alva Edison’s invention, the phonograph, was perceived in Australia soon after it was patented on Dec. 24th, 1877. In February 1878 the Telegraphic Electrical Society Journal in Sydney appraised in an article the advantages of the new sound recording and replay device and wondered “(…) that he [Edison] himself can hardly say what its practical value is or will prove to be.” (p 2). The first phonograph reached Australia as early as June 1879, when an agent of Edison’s company demonstrated the device to an amazing audience in the Collins Street Independent Church in Sydney. But after a few other demonstrations in Sydney and Melbourne in 1879 and 1880, the public interest in the phonograph faded. It was the merit of Professor Douglas Archibald, who reintroduced the phonograph in Australia, when he arrived in Sydney on May 28, 1890, in order to give a series of public lectures and demonstrations of Edison’s Perfected Phonograph, after he had launched such a lecture series in Britain the year before. In an article for the London trade magazine Phonogram, Archibald wrote. “As I was bound for such an outlandish place as Australia, where a phonograph of this civilized and highly organized type had never been heard (…).” (p 5). During a period of 18 months, Archibald appeared in almost every city of the then six British colonies in Australia and in New Zealand to demonstrate the use of the phonograph by recording the human voice and by playing cylinder records with some speeches by prominent persons such as the British prime minister William Gladstone as well as Thomas A. Edison, but also with popular vocals and instrumental performances. However, in this early stage, the phonograph was not seen as an ..entertainment application but as a recording device for office use. The early Edison phonographs were heavy and clumsy apparatuses run by electric motors that required several primary batteries, which were not affordable for private persons. The phonograph and record business in Australia was initially an Edison monopoly until the British patents expired in 1903. In the years before, the Edison Company required a 15% royalty payment on all cylinder recordings made in Australia and it was uneconomical to produce local records on a larger scale. Even the main competitor of Edison, the British Gramophone Company hesitated to enter the Australian market with its gramophones and disc records. The first advertisement for a spring motor gramophone appeared not until 1899. Source: musicbusinessresearch.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/the-early-...

This same photo of Doris Auguste Heindorff listening to a gramophone is also a cover photo of the book: "Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound" by Joy Damousi and Desley Deacon, 2007. The boom is a collection of essays on talking and listening in the age of modernity that brings together major Australian scholars who have followed Alain Corbin's injunction that historians 'can no longer afford to neglect materials pertaining to auditory perception'. Ranging from the sound of gunfire on the Australian goldfields to Alfred Deakin's virile oratory, these essays argue for the influence of the auditory in forming individual and collective subjectivities; the place of speech in understanding individual and collective endeavors; the centrality of speech in marking and negating difference and in struggles for power; and the significance of the technologies of radio and film in forming modern cultural identities."--Publisher's description.

Jackson & MacDonald, 360-362 Kent Street, Sydney (1927). In 1906, Messrs. S.J. Jackson and D.S. Macdonald commenced business in Sydney as jobbers (wholesalers) of ‘Edison’s cylinder records and phonographs. A few years later they began importing talking machines to play the new ‘disc’ records and these were marketed under the trademark ‘REXOPHONE’. The next step was to import motors, tonearms and soundboxes from S.A. Thorens, Switzerland, which were assembled in Sydney to locally made talking machine cabinets and sold under the ‘REXOPHONE’ trademark. Early in the nineteen twenties, the ‘PRISMATIC’ Reflector Sound Chamber was patented. Made of wood it gave a much-improved volume, purity, and richness of tone for which ‘REXONOLAS’ were famous. The peak of production was reached about 1928/9 when more than 100 people were employed at the cabinet factory, and 120 people in the warehouse. Early in the 1930s, the development of radio receivers and the Great Depression caused a collapse, and production of ‘REXONOLAS’ and ‘REXOPORTS’ ceased about 1935. Source: www.radiomuseum.org/dsp_hersteller_detail.cfm?company_id=...

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