Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1997
Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven
object it will differ from its original state for various reasons of fashion and necessity. Perhaps the correct solution is to collect some of each, which presents us with further questions and problems. Those who feel they have confident answers to these questions are not museum people, or if they are, they are building castles in the air. It would be good to know whether the future requires virtual or vital museums. Let us hope there will always be a majority who want to explore reality with all their senses, not just a pseudo-life and history projected on interactive multi-media. They will also seek life and knowledge in the museums, but they will only find them there if the museum collections are assembled into human, national, historical destiny through the exhibitions. József Hajdú: A short history of sound reproduction This short account of sound reproduction extends from the discovery of the wax disc to the appearance of the compact disc. The question of recording sound exercised the human imagination for decades. Growing numbers of scientists were experimenting with it by the second half of the 19th century. The solution was found in 1877, by two men almost simultaneously. Charles Cros, a French poet and natural scientist, had the idea of drawing the sound vibrations with a needle, on a flexible revolving glass disc coated with soot. Zinc engraving was to be used to take a copy from the glass disc onto a metal plate, from which the sounds could be reproduced. Cros, however, only got as far as the theoretical solution. He failed to raise the money to patent the idea or even to make experimental apparatus. Thomas Alva Edison, on the other hand, attached a little needle to the membrane of a telephone receiver. Across the tip of the needle he drew a strip of waxed paper, on which the needle left a visible mark of varying depth corresponding to the sound. The phonograph, as its inventor called it, consisted of a metal drum fixed to a worm shaft, with a winding handle at the end of the shaft. That allowed the drum to be turned and the worm shaft moved in a horizontal direction at the same time. The metal dmm was clothed in a lead sheath, on which the flexible plate, equipped with a needle, scratched a groove that varied in depth according to the sound. When the recording was played back, the needle following the groove caused the flexible metal plate to vibrate, which allowed the sound to be heard. Edison received the patent for his invention on February 19, 1878. Faced with enormous interest, the inventor worked feverishly to resolve the problems. However, only a few months later he stopped experimenting with the phonograph to concentrate on the incandescent lamp. Only in the spring of 1888 did his improved phonograph appear, after further experiments. Meanwhile Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the induction telephone, constructed a similar ‘speaking machine’, which he presented early in 1888 as the Graphophone. The sound reproduced from a wax disc was clearer and more recognizable than the sound from a phonograph, but quieter, so that it had to be heard through a rubber earphone. While the phonograph began to spread steadily in America, there were no initial signs of interest in Europe, though the phonograph was presented in Paris only a few months after it had been unveiled in New York. Charles Pathé, a café owner, first saw the phonograph at a demonstration in Paris in 263
