This edited article about Emile Berliner originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 702 published on 28 June 1975.

Singers’ voices were relayed by horn to a recording device which would then yield up the recording ithrough another horn when a needle tracked the stored sound waves, by John Keay

Everybody was talking about the wonderful new invention by Thomas Alva Edison. You popped a cylinder on the phonograph, they said, and heard music and singers just as if they were in the room with you.

It was the topic of conversation, also, in a draper’s shop in Washington, D.C., where a young German immigrant, Emile Berliner, was working. But as he measured out dress lengths, Berliner’s mind was on other things. His thoughts were full of chemistry and physics which he studied in his spare time in the local libraries.

Soon, electricity and acoustics began to absorb him above all else. In a small laboratory which he had fixed up in his boarding-house, he started experimenting in these fields.

Browsing in Washington Museum one day he became fascinated with one of the exhibits. This was Frenchman Leon Scott’s phonautograph of 1857. It was an instrument which showed the sound waves of the human voice, traced on blackened paper. The thing that most intrigued him was its tracing movement which went laterally – from side to side in a wavy line.

He felt that this could be applied effectively to a sound recording machine. This would improve on the results achieved by Edison’s already established up-and-down (hill-and-dale) method, used in the phonograph.

Deciding that flat discs instead of cylinders were more suitable for this new technique, he set to work. In 1888, he made the first, simple, hand-cranked disc recording machine, which he called a gramophone.

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This edited article about Edison and the history of the gramophone originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 701 published on 21 June 1975.

Thomas Edison demonstrates his phonograph in the cellar of his home by Peter Jackson

“I was never so taken aback in all my life!” So said the great American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, when he heard his own voice coming from the little machine he had just created, quoting the simple rhyme, “Mary had a little lamb.” Scratchy and indistinct the words may have been, but they were the first recorded sounds ever heard.

It was 1877 when Edison hit upon the idea of a machine to record and reproduce sound. He called it a phonograph.

His first model had a grooved, brass cylinder covered with tin foil and cranked by a handle. It also had two diaphragms (metal discs), each with a steel needle fixed in the centre, on either side of the cylinder. When a person spoke into the mouthpiece of one of the diaphragms, the vibrations made by his voice caused it to move so that the attached needle made a pattern of tiny indentations on the rotating tin foil. By placing the needle of the other diaphragm at the start of the groove and cranking again, a crude reproduction of the voice was heard. The sound could be amplified by placing a small horn over the reproducing diaphragm.

In December of that year, Edison took his invention to New York, where a demonstration was arranged for the editors of the “Scientific American” magazine. Here is how it was reported.

“Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into the office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial goodnight.”

In the following months, the public flocked to exhibitions of the new machine, but, like most novelties, its appeal soon faded and, by the latter half of 1878, it had been almost forgotten.

In the meanwhile, Edison had put aside his phonograph in order to concentrate on other work.

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This edited article about roller skates originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 699 published on 7 June 1975.

A cartoon from the 1890s poking fun at the roller skating fad

Modern roller skates are an excellent idea, but the early ones were not. “Early” means pre-1863, the year in which James Plimpton of New York patented the prototype of today’s skates and started the craze of roller skating.

The first known roller skates were worn by a Belgian musical instrument maker named Merlin in 1760. Either lack of practice or crude manufacture, or both, resulted in a fiasco. Indeed, it appeared that a new sport had begun and ended on the same day. The happening occurred at Carlisle House, Soho Square, London, at a big party, when the intrepid skater burst into the ballroom playing his violin.

At full speed, and, presumably, scattering the dancers and onlookers to the winds, he hurtled uncontrollably into a splendid mirror that had cost £500, a king’s ransom in those days. The mirror was smashed into fragments and Merlin was badly hurt.

Happily, the hostess of the occasion, Mrs Cornelly, gained fame from the event, perhaps because people hoped for another such happening at a future party.

This edited article about King Camp Gillette originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 699 published on 7 June 1975.

A busy barber-surgeon’s shop by Peter Jackson

“Beaver!” Beastly little boys used to shout this at everything that moved in a beard. Then they would run off before the irate owners could assault them. This was standard practice in the 1920s, and as most of those then equipped with bristles were old men, they were unlikely to catch up with their tormentors. But occasionally an artist, the only other bearded category in Britain at that time, would have his revenge, assuming he was young enough to chase the offenders.

How did the absence of beards come about? It was not simply a change in fashion, a deliberate desire to divest men’s faces of anything remotely Victorian. It was really the doing of an American with a strange-sounding name, who was born in Wisconsin in 1855.

He was called King Camp Gillette.

Before studying the life of this revolutionary who invented the first safety razor with disposable blades, let us consider the human beard, noting for the record that there are plenty of hairy fellows about today, too many for that rude cry of the 1920s to be revived with safety.

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This edited article about Hubert Cecil Booth originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 693 published on 26 April 1975.

Hubert Cecil Booth’s vacuum cleaning service

If, in the past, events had turned out differently, all vacuum cleaners nowadays would be called booths. Of course, no one would deny clever Mr. Hoover’s right to his fame but the real pioneer was Hubert Cecil Booth.

A mere 75 years ago, spring-cleaning was a yearly nightmare for house-owners and maids alike, but especially the latter who had to do the dirty work. The bright sun showed up acres of dust, layer upon layer of it around the house, and all was confusion as carpets were beaten and dusters and brushes wielded. As if there was not enough smoke in the sky above every town and city, clouds of dust filled the air.

And what was the result of this time of torment? Most of the dust simply settled again, a dirty fact of Victorian life. Carpets, heavy curtains and chairs were ingrained with dirt, for there was no real cleaning aid. Spring-cleaning merely shifted dirt from one place to another.

Enter Mr. Booth, a bridge-building engineer by trade. Hating the upheaval that spring-cleaning caused in his own house, he found himself in the Empire Music Hall in London. On stage was an American inventor, who was demonstrating his new dust remover, a box with a compressed air bag on top of it. Down went the air onto a carpet and made some of the dust blow into the box, but most of it descended onto the carpet again. When Booth met the inventor, he asked: “Why don’t you suck out the dust?” to which the annoyed American wrathfully replied that it had been tried and it had failed.

Booth started thinking. One day he was at St. Pancras Station watching another compressed air machine trying to clean a carriage. The result was a dust-storm, after which he and the other invited observers went off to a restaurant.

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This edited article about the umbrella originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 692 published on 19 April 1975.

Mrs Gamp with her trusty umbrella by Joseph Clayton Clark

It is not pleasant to be jeered at for nearly thirty years, but that was the unhappy fate of Jonas Hanway. This good-hearted man, whose hobbies included foreign travel, helping poor children and protecting young chimney sweeps, earned his hoots of derision by daring to use an umbrella on the streets of London when it rained; indeed, he was the first man to carry one regularly, from the 1750s onwards.

And what sort of people scoffed at this sensible man? Some were over-religious folk, who loudly suggested that he was defying the Lord’s gift of rain, which was there to make everyone wet, but most of those who jeered at Jonas were coachmen, afraid that he would start a fashion and so lose them trade. When finally another brave spirit, John MacDonald, began carrying an umbrella, he, too, was derided with cries of “Frenchman, Frenchman, why don’t you call a coach?” Whether these shouts were because the French were known to use umbrellas occasionally, or because manly British mobs considered that Frenchmen were sissies, is uncertain.

By the time Jonas died in 1786, umbrellas were here to stay. But they had been used for many centuries elsewhere, and, in fact, there were a few around in Britain before Jonas began his thirty-year pilgrimage.

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This edited article about the hydrogen balloon originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 684 published on 22 February 1975.

The balloon ascent arranged for Louis XVI with Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlands, by Wilf Hardy

A nightmare was descending from the skies, or so the simple villagers of Gonesse in France thought that August day in 1783. When the horrifying object landed they stood back, gaping at the monster, which appeared to be expiring before their very eyes, so much so that one daring man risked putting a shot into it. Then, as it gasped out its life, the onlookers went at it with pitchforks and clubs until the great beast’s smell drove them back.

Finally, its remains were tied to a horse’s tail and torn to pieces after a gallop over rough fields. The villagers then relaxed. The first successful hydrogen balloon – fortunately without a passenger – was “dead”.

The early 1780s were thick with “firsts”, and the very first balloon flights, with and without passengers, were not made with the help of hydrogen. Our story really begins in the home of two French paper-makers, Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, who lived at Annonay, near Lyons. More than seventy years before they became immortals a Portuguese named Gusmao had thought of a hot air balloon and had actually let a primitive model one off in a hall in front of the King of Portugal, but the fire which powered its parachute-like sail set the hall’s curtains alight and that was the end of a brave effort, a half-first as it were.

The Montgolfiers probably knew nothing of Gusmao, for they had got their idea after noticing the way that pieces of burned papers floated upwards from their fire at home. They did not know about hot air becoming rarified and rising, but they did not need to. Highly imaginative men, they decided that if they could harness the rising “gas” they could lift even a man into the air.

In November 1782, they shot a silk bag to the roof of their kitchen by putting it with its open end downwards over the fire; bigger bags followed. Their first public demonstration took place on June 5, 1783, in Annonay, the balloon being made of linen and paper and having a 13 metre (approx) diameter.

A fire was lit under it and eight strong men fought its pull as it filled out. Suddenly it shot up to 2,000 metres or more, then slowly came down as its hot air cooled, and it landed more than a mile away from its blast-off point. Cheers rent the air as the townspeople celebrated the Montgolfiers’ triumph.

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This edited article about Alexander Graham Bell originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 681 published on 1 February 1975.

Bell in the attic and Watson the cellar (left) and Alexander Graham Bell in Boston (right)

The first words ever heard over a wire were caused by an accident. They were to herald the age of the telephone.

“Mr Watson, come here! I want you!”

The speaker was in the attic, and Mr. Watson was down in a cellar. But a minute later he was in the attic, out of breath from excitement and his dash up the stairs.

“I heard you,” he shouted. “I heard you say the words.”

Mr Watson had some cause to be excited. He had just heard the first voice message ever sent over a wire.

The year was 1876, the place was Boston, Massachusetts, and the inventor of this primitive telephone, standing there pale and excited, was a young Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell.

He had spilt some acid in his workroom and had used the first telephone to summon help. Together with Thomas Watson, his assistant, he had been working for many months before that momentous day when Bell’s voice from the attic had sent Watson dashing breathlessly up the stairs.

Surprisingly, the potentialities of his invention were not immediately recognised. When he took his telephone to a great exhibition being held that year in Philadelphia, he was given only a small corner under the stairs in which to set up his device. Almost out of sight he was largely ignored, and those who did stop to inspect the telephone stayed only a minute or so before passing on.

Happily though, Don Pedro II, the emperor of Brazil and an old acquaintance of Bell’s happened to pass by one day. After exchanging a few words with Bell, he turned his attention to his invention. When he was given a demonstration, he nearly dropped the receiver in wonder, exclaiming: “Why, it talks!”

By then a large crowd had gathered around the illustrious visitor, including a number of judges who were visibly impressed.

But there were still many obstacles to be overcome before Bell received the recognition that was due to him. Other inventors had been working on similar lines and he had to fight several hundred law suits before he was legally acknowledged as the inventor of the telephone.

Even then, when the first telephone exchange was set up in 1878, the total number of subscribers was only twenty one!

This edited article about America’s cotton industry originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 679 published on 18 January 1975.

Intruders examining Eli Whitney’s cotton gin

Those were the days, the old soldiers sighed, when they were fighting the British. But now ten years had passed since the peace treaty finally put an end to the war and confirmed that the United States was a truly independent nation.

They stared out of the windows of a stately home on the Georgia plantation, watching the black slaves at work in the fields. What a crazy world it was, they all told each other, a world full of nations clamouring out for cotton, but here in Georgia, in the heart of the cotton-growing belt, they couldn’t afford to grow it. There was just no way of separating cotton quickly from its seed, and by hand it took ten hours for even the best slave to clean a single pound of cotton.

Their hostess looked around at the officers-turned-planters, who had all served in the War of Independence against Britain under her late husband, General Nathaniel Greene, and who now owned many of the plantations in the neighbourhood. Then she thought of the young man from Yale University who was serving as a tutor in her house and she uttered some historic words.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “tell your troubles to Mr. Whitney. You say you want a quick way to separate cotton from its seed. Ask him. He can make anything.”

The officers knew that young Eli Whitney was good with his hands, but they could not know that, within ten days, he would invent a machine which would not only make their fortunes but change the history of the world.

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This edited article about canning originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 677 published on 4 January 1975.

Nicolas Appert demonstrates the succes of food preservation in a tin can by Henry Fox

There are probably more houses with than without an old tin in use somewhere on the premises. Whether it started life as a biscuit tin, a tea tin or tobacco tin, what could be handier as a container for the handyman’s nuts and bolts or Mum’s needles and pins, or for chalks and crayons, for small change, or for foreign stamps waiting to be sorted? Today there are more plastic boxes about than formerly, and relatively fewer metal boxes – but only relatively, thanks to the magpie instinct of most people.

The metal box has a long history in packaging. The earliest known example is a lead drum for snuff, with an engraved paper label encircling it, and this was used in the 1780s. But this is an ‘odd man out’ because the metal most widely used in packaging is not, of course, lead, but tin plate. This probably made its debut as a packaging material in the early 19th century, when food canning was introduced.

Canning – the preservation of foodstuffs in sealed containers – is a convenience for the housewife today, but when it started, it was much more than that for the first customers, who were not housewives but soldiers and sailors, whose diet had until then been appallingly bad. This was especially true of the old sailing ships, which might spend weeks away from port where fresh meat or vegetables could be taken on board.

In the year 1806 or thereabouts, the French Navy tried out the first ‘canned’ foods, prepared by a confectioner, Nicolas Appert (1749-1841), and they proved so successful that Appert was rewarded with a large cash prize. These early preserved foodstuffs, however, were not canned in the modern sense – certainly not tinned – because the containers used were glass bottles with corks. The first practical use of metal cans was made in London a few years later, by Bryan Donkin and John Gamble at a factory in Blue Anchor Lane, Bermondsey. A tablet in the wall of a GLC schoolkeeper’s house now marks the site of this enterprise which was to start a change in the feeding habits of the western world. In 1831, or soon afterwards, Donkin & Gamble were canning beef, mutton, veal, and meat and vegetable soups.

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