Record players usually include a tiny light bulb, the light of which shines through a series of holes in the outer part of the turntable, so that when it starts, we can see whether the speed is correct. This serves to adjust the revolutions of the turntable. This example brings together the light bulb and the phonograph, the two most popular inventions of the 1,903 patents which Edison registered. But we continue to find them throughout the twentieth century.

Talking of revolutions, history could give us a rather anecdotal account of all the revolutions to take place since then using sound recordings, for instance. Wasn’t it a record, Grándola Vila Morena, that the radios played in Portugal to give the population the sign that the Revolution of the Carnations had started? Then in Czechoslovakia, a group of young artists (including the current president, Havel) with party authorisation to cross the iron curtain took the recordings of the imprisoned rock group, Plastic People, out of the country with them. Once pressed in England, these records became the symbol of a Czech youth which had given itself up to cultural resistance, and whom it had been very difficult to hear about from the other side of the continent. In his speech on the founding of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel referred to the rock group The Velvet Underground, saying that the creative freedom that symbolised their records had made a lasting impression on a generation which was now enthusiastically directing a new country towards the future...

The major social and cultural movements of the twentieth century, with a new social class of young people as their main movers and pop music in the extraordinary role of vehicle of communication, might never have happened without the constant circulation of round black pieces of plastic. It meant that half a million young people flocked to Woodstock to listen to the musicians they knew from their records. It meant that the watchword of the punk movement made its way around the world. Without the former, we might not be talking about 0.7% or certain ecological and humanistic moratoria, and who knows if the NGO would have existed? And without the latter, neither the squatter movement nor urban associations would probably exist.

This is one possible vision of one possible world, ranging from Jamaican sound systems, music bars and "discotheques" (the name speaks for itself1) to certain present-day musics which are catching on like wildfire, in which records are used as the source of sound. So the records are the material with which the artist works, combining them, taking some contents out of context and appropriating recorded words, melodies and rhythms to create a new composition, totally independently of the original material.

Paradoxically, perhaps we should say here that Edison had no intention of his second best-known invention being used as a container for music.

19 February 1878 is the date he received the patent for his "talking machine" or Edison phonograph. This invention, which its creator considered particularly useful for administrative work, was basically a Dictaphone which recorded sounds in the form of grooves on tin foil rolled around a cylinder which transmitted the vibration of a membrane by means of a needle. When the needle moved over the grooves, the membrane vibrated and reproduced the original sound. This was the basic principle for subsequent models, which gradually substituted first the tin for wax, and then the cylinder for a disk, wax for plastic, the cylinder for a sapphire needle connected to a transducer... This was all quite unheard of, and we could say that with it, our words ceased to be blown away in the wind.
 
This is how Edison presented his inventions in the press release which he himself wrote: "This instrument with neither tongue nor teeth imitates your tones, speaks with the same voice as you, says the same words as you, and centuries after you have turned to dust it will be able to repeat each idle thought, each tender dream, each vain word you choose to whisper before its thin metal diaphragm."

There is something visionary and futuristic about these words, written at a time when the first test of the phonograph consisted of Edison reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb followed immediately by his partner, John Kruesi, saying something in German to check that the machine was not limited to recording words in English.

Many years passed before the fidelity of reproduction prompted the use of the phonograph to record music. Perhaps Edison’s deafness allowed him to go further than his competitors, but the application of electromagnetism to the task of appropriating and reproducing sounds soon made higher levels of recording quality possible. Twenty years after Edison’s patent, the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen put the finishing touches to the Telegraphone, applying a principle which had been known since the second century BC: there are materials which memorise the direction in which they have been magnetised (such as the compass). The discovery of electricity last century led to the detecting of its relationship with magnetism: electromagnetism acts on motors, microphones, transformers and the telephone. It is also the basis of magnetic recordings, from the initial steel wires till it reaches the plastic tape covered with an emulsion of metal particles. It seemed quite likely that this procedure would take the mechanism beyond the recording of a dictated letter, taking fidelity and quality into account, all the more so if we read an article in the Scientific American in 1900: "The Telegraphone produces a much clearer sound, completely free of the disagreeable noises which are heard on the Phonograph."2

If we take a look at the history of the modest phonograph, we will see the decisive effects for its evolution of both advances in recording and reproduction techniques, and the improved design of the various materials which go to make up hard- and software. In the course of the twentieth century it became a very popular everyday instrument which, at the same time, was responsible for one of the most extraordinary revolutions to have taken place in the world of art. Firstly, because the physical presence of a listener in the place where a concert was being held ceased to be necessary to be able to listen to it. And secondly, because this was shortly to lead to unexpected effects in the world of musical composition, as music which could not be performed live was composed exclusively to be heard on record. As a result, certain types of music ceased to be exclusive, and others emerged with the evident intention of being for the masses. Perhaps music as a universal language would never have reached so far afield and, with the help of the radio, in such a short space of time. The existence of a living, permanently changing music which was popular all over the world, as well as the discreet and gradual demolition of the barriers separating cultivated and popular music were the natural consequence of all the fantastic situations outlined above. Furthermore, mass production cut the costs and prices of these supports; as of the seventies, this meant that making a record started to become a possible undertaking for individuals or groups, apart from for the industry, which was born, fed on and grew enormously as a result of record production. If the disappearance of compulsory military service in some countries saw the number of students at art schools rocket in the seventies, it is equally true that phonographic production of music has produced the most surprising number of musicians in all history, more than all the orchestras and bands put together.

And onto another form of magic: how to turn night into day. Edison’s second great success was to harness the incandescence, the slow light-giving burning of certain materials and store them in a glass container to light up the world’s long nights. We can now go on to think of all the thousands of things that our commonplaceness has stripped of poetry, but which make us irreversibly see human activity in terms of light. The humble light bulb started to shine one day in 1879, and did not go out until forty hours later. A year later, Edison set up the mass production of this extraordinary recipient, overtaking Henry Ford, who is seen as the father of mass production. Edison’s factory in Menlo Park was a laboratory which worked not only on the applications but also on the profitability of these scientific discoveries. The inventor created his own firms to deal with the manufacture and distribution of his products. He designed an installation to distribute electricity and created the first electric-light power station in Manhattan in the early eighteen-eighties. Once supply was guaranteed at domestic as well as industrial level, the incandescent lamp and other products from his laboratory became everyday items in urban society.

Meanwhile, Edison, whose biographers see him as a man with a strong personality, given to a degree of excess, maintained that he enjoyed none of the advantages of his inventions: "[...] I am capable of taking a great deal of trouble to avoid seeing even one incandescent light." He worked twenty hours a day, and smoked as many cigars. Obsessed by the effectiveness, the profitability and the economy of time, he lost none in inventing tools to save jobs in the production workshops ("I am working on the construction of a machine to process refractory minerals. In time, we’ll manage it, and then we’ll earn more money."). He was a paradigm of the liberal entrepreneur, and his contemporaries saw him as a hero of progress. Kings and masses alike bowed down at his feet. He embodied the pride of someone who places their mind at the service of humanity,3 asking only for a percentage. His name was handed down to his offspring (the "Edison effect", "Ediphone")...4

A romantic spirit and futurism before the fact existed side-by-side in this contradictory character who deposited a vast technological and cultural system in the current account of human progress, by creating, inventing, everything which logically seemed as though it ought to exist. He created a world of individual, social and cultural communication and development which is usually called the "Edison galaxy", because the historical transformations brought about by his devices are comparable to those produced by the invention of the printing press. Machines that record sound, autonomous batteries, artificial light, domestic mains electricity, films with sound, cableless communications, etc.; these are the things that shape our everyday landscape. To use a very graphic example, we are basically talking about Edison when we say: "The storm causes a power cut, and the concert had to be cancelled. The group’s manager immediately telegraphed the producer’s office to stop the record launch till after the concert could be held. The only lights to be seen in the huge stadium were those of the production team, run on batteries..."

1 They used to be called “dance halls” and the orchestras which provided the music had time to prepare their repertoires from one year to the next, as every summer so few new songs reached the public, who in any case had no chance to hear them until they were played by the orchestra. The score was a kind of hypertext, without the cooperation of which the music could not be repeated and could not travel. Orchestras slowly started to disappear when everyone preferred the original and had access to it...

2 Poulsen’s invention was improved in the course of World War I and used for espionage and counterespionage. For instance, it became a weapon which played a part in the sinking of the transatlantic liner, Lusitania, by a German U-boat. World War II, the Cold War, the Watergate and Lewinsky “scandals”, were all clear targets for the use and improvement of magnetic tape for military and political purposes. This support was also used “professionally” with the advent of the music industry (until the laser was developed for this purpose, it provided the master copy of recordings). We also come across it as a working tool in the fields of concrete music and electronic music, tendencies of so-called “cultivated” music which began to be developed as a result of the potential of radio for composers. Finally, it headed its own great revolution with the cassette, which was small, strong and recyclable.

3 In 1896 he developed the X-ray screen and did not register the patent, offering it to the public domain by virtue of its great potential for medical use.

4 The inventor of the compact disc is unknown; we only have the date and the name of the multinational for which s/he worked.