Edison Voicewriter

[TC Chris]

Most of my finds these days are rediscoveries in Mom's house as we continue to mine it for stuff. This weekend I extracted the Edison Voicewriters, artifacts from my Dad's office. When they were no longer serving in satisfactory manner they were retired and, of course, saved in the basement. These devices use a flexible vinyl disc the size and shape of a 45 RPM record. One online source said they used Edison's favored vertical-cut system. The flexible discs could be stored in a file folder and would withstand bending.

One article talked about how analog media like this are more durable than digital because they require less specialized (and fallible) playback devices.

https://johnjburnslibrary.wordpress.com ... ecordings/

Let's add a photo (not mine, which need to be cleaned up). Oops, all the photos are jpgs and I can't attach. Here's a link:

https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2016/09/15/take-a-memo/


Here are a couple fairly short YouTubes of the recorders.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY4UDJef7sA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic_JTliRAHU

Chris Campbell

[hermitcrab]

Pretty cool, never saw one before

[19&41]

It must've been interesting working for that company in it's later years. I wonder how long it took them to finally give up the cylinder recording system in favor of that disc recording system. They must've held onto it for grim death as magnetic recording media took over the dictation tasks.

[walyfd]

By the time this was made, Edison, like Fisher after selling out, was nothing but a name.

Outside of this, what did the name Edison matter? Realistically, Edison should have been a contender with fisher, Scott, McIntosh, ampex... RCA killed the name and became a mediocre hifi company with a fantastic recording division...