of the curator of Science and Technology in
the Smithsonian Institution's United States National Museum._

The story of Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone has been
told and retold. How he became involved in the difficult task of making
practical phonograph records, and succeeded (in association with Charles
Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell), is not so well known.

But material collected through the years by the U. S. National Museum of
the Smithsonian Institution now makes clear how Bell and two associates
took Edison's tinfoil machine and made it reproduce sound from wax
instead of tinfoil. They began their work in Washington, D. C., in 1879,
and continued until granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax.

Preserved at the Smithsonian are some 20 pieces of experimental
apparatus, including a number of complete machines. Their first
experimental machine was sealed in a box and deposited in the
Smithsonian archives in 1881. The others were delivered by Alexander
Graham Bell to the National Museum in two lots in 1915 and 1922. Bell
was an old man by this time, busy with his aeronautical experiments in
Nova Scotia.

It was not until 1947, however, that the Museum received the key to the
experimental "Graphophones," as they were called to differentiate them
from the Edison machine. In that year Mrs. Laura F. Tainter donated to
the Museum 10 bound notebooks, along with Tainter's unpublished
autobiography.[1] This material describes in detail the strange machines
and even stranger experiments which led in 1886 to a greatly improved
phonograph.

Thomas A. Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877. But the fame
bestowed on Edison for this startling invention (sometimes called his
most original) was not due to its efficiency. Recording with the tinfoil
phonograph is too difficult to be practical. The tinfoil tears easily,
and even when the stylus is properly adjusted, the reproduction is
distorted and squeaky, and good for only a few playbacks. Nevertheless
young Edison, the "wizard" as he was called, had hit upon a secret of
which men had dreamed for centuries.[2] Immediately after this
discovery, however, he did not improve it, allegedly because of an
agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City
electric light and power system.

[Illustration: Figure 1.--CHARLES SUMNER TAINTER (1854-1940) from a
photograph taken in San Diego, California, 1919. (_Smithsonian phot