By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 1992, The Syracuse Newspapers
Tom Edison was no rock-'n' roller. But he should
get
the original credits for the Beatles and U2 and Prince and all
the others.
Without Tom, they'd just be whistlin' in the wind.
Tom also helped save the whales. But I should start at the beginning.
Tom Edison was a kind of general-purpose inventor 100 years ago.
He didn't like working in the dark any more than you do, so he invented
the electric
light bulb.
No light-bulb jokes, please—it only took one Tom Edison to screw
in a
light bulb. But before long the whole nation and even the whole
world gave up
their whale-oil lamps and starting lighting up their lives with
electricity.
You might say they got a charge out of it.
But what does this have to do with rock and roll?
I knew you'd ask. So I did a little research.
When Tom was a boy, he was fascinated by sound. Music in those
days was
nothing like what we have today—heck, even Elvis wasn't around
then—and
the only way you could hear music was to play it yourself or maybe
listen to
somebody else play it.
In other words, you had to hear it "live"—no FM, no
Top 40, no cassettes,
no records. It was either a concert or maybe mama banging away
on the piano in
the living room.
When he was still a kid, Tom had a modern-day experience that
made him even
more interested in the sounds around him. He was the victim of
child abuse.
Somebody cuffed him in the ear so hard that he went partially
deaf.
Later, when he wasn't locked up in his laboratory inventing light
bulbs or
any of the hundreds of other amazing things that he dreamed up,
he kept
returning to his idea of turning the whole sound problem upside
down. If you
couldn't bring people to the concert, why not bring the concert
to the
people?
So Tom got a needle and some wax and made history. He dipped a
cylinder in
the wax and stuck a crank on one end. Then he put the needle on
the small end
of a horn, like the end of a trumpet, and rested the point on
the edge of the
cylinder. When he turned the crank, a thing that looked like a
screw pulled
the needle sideways while the cylinder turned.
When you looked at it, you could see that it was making a groove.
It was a
plain, old, ordinary groove if nobody said anything, but it you
talked or sang
while the thing was turning, the groove had little wiggles in
it. The wiggles
turned out to be sound waves etched in wax.
The rest was easy. You put the needle back at the beginning and
turned the
crank and got sound out of the horn. It wasn't hi-fi, of course,
but it was
sound. The boombox was born.
When rock came rolling in, 40 years ago, there was another sort
of boom—the baby boom. When these kids got to be teen-agers, they discovered
a new
kind of music and a new form of Tom Edison's invention—the 45-prm
record
player. It didn't take long for 45s and rock music to turn into
the hottest
things since diapers.
And then, of course, there was a new generation, with cassettes
and the
Beach Boys. And later still, CDs and Madonna. In each case, sound
got better
and better as it came to us in newer ways.
But it's still recorded sound. If he only could, Tom should take
a bow.
technofile:
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