Due to Hollywood, every time I consider a Dictaphone, my creativeness instantly jumps to a mid-Twentieth-century workplace, Don Draper suavely seated at his desk, voicing advert copy right into a desktop machine. A wonderfully coiffed lady from the secretarial pool then takes the recordings and neatly sorts them up, with carbon copies after all.
I had no concept the Dictaphone truly had its roots within the nineteenth century and a rivalry between two early tech giants: Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. And though it took a long time to take maintain within the trendy workplace, it discovered novel makes use of in different fields.
Who invented the Dictaphone?
The Dictaphone was born from the competitors and the cooperation of Bell and Edison and their succesful groups of researchers. In 1877, Edison had launched the phonograph, which he later declared his favorite invention. And but he wasn’t fairly sure about its industrial functions. Initially, he thought it is likely to be good for recording phone messages. Then he started to think about different makes use of: a mechanical stenographer for businessmen, a notetaker for college students, an elocution teacher, a speaking e-book for the blind. The playback of recorded music—the phonograph’s eventual killer app—was No. 4 on Edison’s list. And after a number of public demonstrations, he put aside the invention to pursue different pursuits.
Thomas Edison’s early phonograph from 1877 used a needle to report sound waves on a rotating cylinder wrapped with tinfoil. Thomas Edison Nationwide Historic Park/Nationwide Park Service/U.S. Division of the Inside
Enter Bell. In 1880, the French authorities had awarded Bell the Volta Prize and 50,000 francs (about US $10,000 on the time) for his invention of the phone. The next yr, he, his cousin Chichester A. Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter used the prize cash to discovered the Volta Laboratory Affiliation in Washington, D.C., to do analysis on sound recording and transmission.
Tainter noticed potential within the phonograph. Edison’s model used a needle to etch sound waves on a sheet of tinfoil wrapped round a metallic cylinder. The foil was simply broken, the sound high quality was distorted and squeaky, and the cylinder might be replayed just a few occasions earlier than degrading and turning into inaudible. Edison’s phonograph couldn’t be simply commercialized, in different phrases.
Chichester Bell and Tainter significantly improved the sound high quality by changing the tinfoil with wax-coated cardboard cylinders. By 1886, the researchers at Volta Lab had a patented product: the Graphophone.
Two colleagues of Alexander Graham Bell refined Edison’s phonograph within the Eighteen Eighties to create the Graphophone, which used wax-coated cardboard cylinders relatively than tinfoil. Common Historical past Archive/Getty Photographs
Bell and Tainter believed the Graphophone would discover best use as a mechanical stenographer. As a “dictator,” you’ll converse into the tube, and a stylus would hint the sound wave on the wax cylinder. The cylinder would then be handed off to a secretary for transcription. Typists used playback machines with foot pedals to manage the pace of the recording and to reverse and repeat as obligatory.
A producing firm arrange by Volta Lab bought a number of machines to the U.S. authorities. One enthusiastic early adopter was Edward D. Easton, a famous stenographer for the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Courtroom. Though Easton took notes in shorthand, he instantly recited his notes into the Graphophone after every session.
Easton grew to become an evangelist for the instrument, writing glowing accounts in a commerce journal. The machine made no errors and will take dictation as quick because the speaker may articulate. The phonograph by no means complained when a transcriber wanted a phrase repeated. The phonograph didn’t endure from poor penmanship. Anybody may study to make use of the machine in two weeks or much less, in comparison with months or years to grasp stenography. Such had been Easton’s claims. (Easton was such a fan that he cofounded the Columbia Phonograph Co., which went on to turn into a number one maker of phonographs and recorded music and lives on right now as Columbia Records.)
Earlier than lengthy, a number of firms had been manufacturing and promoting phonographs and dictation machines. Though demand was initially mild, patent-infringement lawsuits sprang up, which quickly threatened to bankrupt the entire firms concerned. Lastly, in 1896, the assorted events agreed to cease preventing and to cross-license one another’s mental property. This didn’t finish the Bell-Edison rivalry, nevertheless it allowed the phonograph enterprise to take off in earnest, aided by the gross sales of mass-produced recorded music cylinders. And the accepted title for this leisure machine grew to become the phonograph.
The Dictaphone Will get Right down to Enterprise
However Bell, Tainter, and Edison didn’t neglect the unique promise of mechanical stenography, and the rivals quickly got here out with competing and really comparable merchandise designed particularly for dictation: the Dictaphone and the Ediphone. The general public discovered it troublesome to differentiate the 2 merchandise, and it wasn’t lengthy earlier than “dictaphone” was getting used to explain all dictation machines. (The Columbia Graphophone Co. trademarked “Dictaphone” in 1907—a complicated neologism of dicta from the Latin for “sayings” or “say repeatedly” and cellphone from the Greek for “voice” or “sound.”)
As David Morton recounts in his 1999 e-book Off the File (Rutgers College Press), Dictaphone gross sales accelerated as scientific administration for enterprise started to take root. Workplace managers intent on streamlining, standardizing, and systemizing workflows noticed the Dictaphone as a labor-saving gadget. In 1912, for example, an effectivity fee arrange by U.S. President William Taft endorsed using dictation machines in authorities places of work. The railroad and insurance coverage industries adopted go well with as they standardized their monetary data. Later, managers started utilizing dictation machines to beat their enterprise correspondence.
A Congressional reporter makes use of a Dictaphone in 1908. The U.S. authorities was an early adopter of the machines.Library of Congress
And but, the Dictaphone wasn’t clearly destined to turn into an indispensable piece of workplace tools just like the typewriter. In 1923, for example, 15,000 dictation machines had been bought in america, versus 744,000 typewriters.
In 1926, the Dictaphone Corp. tried to drum up curiosity by sponsoring Henry Lunn, founder of a big U.Okay. journey firm, on an around-the-world lecture tour. At every lodge he visited, the corporate ensured there was a Dictaphone for Lunn to report his diary. Take into account this a prototype for the fashionable lodge enterprise heart. On the finish of his journey, Lunn printed Around the World With a Dictaphone—half travelogue, half proselytizing for Christian church buildings to help the League of Nations, and half Dictaphone promotion. Even so, by 1945, Dictaphone estimated that solely 15 to 25 % of the potential market had been captured.
There have been social causes working in opposition to dictation machines, Morton says in his e-book. Executives relied on their secretaries not just for dictation and transcription, but in addition for his or her usually unacknowledged help in prompting, correcting, and filling of their bosses’ ideas—the mushy expertise {that a} machine couldn’t change.
Morton additionally attributes the gradual uptake to the expertise itself. One quirk of the Dictaphone is that it continued to make use of wax cylinders lengthy after phonograph gamers had switched to discs. Transcribers usually complained that the wax recordings had been unintelligible—dictators wanted to talk immediately into the talking tube, loudly, clearly, and at an applicable tempo, however many didn’t.
A secretary performs again the sound from a recorded Ediphone cylinder in 1930 to transcribe the cylinder’s contents.Popperfoto/Getty Photographs
Throughout World Struggle II, Dictaphone lastly ditched the wax cylinders in favor of etching grooves on a plastic belt, though the brand new machines had been obtainable solely to U.S. authorities businesses till the tip of the warfare. In 1947, the corporate publicly launched the brand new expertise with its Time-Grasp sequence. Every Dictabelt held about quarter-hour of recording. In the meantime, Edison’s Ediphone was rebranded the Voicewriter and recorded on distinctive purple plastic discs.
This 1953 Edison Voicewriter recorded the speaker’s voice on plastic Diamond Discs. Magnetic tape got here later.Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Design Museum/Smithsonian Establishment
Within the Nineteen Sixties, Dictaphone lastly embraced magnetic recording tape, within the type of cassette tapes. Strain initially got here from European firms, such because the Dutch electronics firm Philips, which entered the U.S. market in 1958 with a low-priced tape-cartridge machine. 4 years later, Philips launched the Compact Cassette, which grew to become the idea of right now’s audio cassette. Transistorized electronics furthered miniaturization and made dictation machines way more moveable. Ultimately, solid-state storage changed magnetic tape, and right now, all of us carry round a dictation gadget with an successfully infinite recording time by way of cloud storage, and, if we select to make use of it, computerized transcription.
The Dictaphone within the Classroom
Not one of the tales about businessmen utilizing (or abusing) Dictaphones actually shocked me. What did shock me had been the artistic methods the Dictaphone was used as a pedagogical device.
In 1924, for instance, Dwight Everett Watkins on the College of California described in a paper how his college students used a microphone, an amplifier, a telemegaphone (a kind of speaker), and a Dictaphone to help in public talking. The setup helped college students perceive their rhetorical imperfections: dangerous grammar and dangerous sentence and paragraph construction. It additionally helped with elocution—one of many early functions that Edison envisioned for his phonograph.
In 1933, George F. Meyer wrote about utilizing the Dictaphone as an academic help for blind and low-vision college students in Minneapolis. Lecturers recorded course materials that might in any other case have needed to be learn aloud. And the scholars favored having the ability to hearken to the fabric repeatedly with out inconveniencing a human reader.
College students in 1930 hearken to a Dictaphone recording, which the seated lady controls with foot pedals.George Rinhart/Corbis/Getty Photographs
In 1938, Frances M. Freeman wrote her grasp’s thesis on whether or not the Dictaphone may assist typing college students who had been struggling to grasp the ability. Her research was supported by the Dictaphone Gross sales Corp., however sadly for the corporate, she concluded that utilizing a Dictaphone supplied no benefit in studying to sort. She did discover that the scholars within the Dictaphone group appeared extra alert at school than college students taught the normal manner.
That final discovering was borne out in a 1964 experiment at Dunbar Elementary College in New Orleans, the place the Dictaphone Corp. had outfitted an “digital classroom.” The concept was to assist reluctant college students by fostering an setting the place studying was enjoyable. As Principal Beulah E. Brown associated in an article concerning the experiment, she’d first encountered a Dictaphone a number of years earlier whereas on sabbatical and instantly noticed its pedagogical potential. The Dictaphone, Brown wrote, promised individually tailor-made academic experiences, permitting college students to give attention to particular challenges and liberating the instructor to have extra private interactions with every youngster. Testimonials from Warren Honore’s fifth grade class attest to its success as a fascinating expertise.
From the Dictaphone to Electronic mail to AI
As a historian of expertise, I cherished studying that two heavyweights within the area, Melvin Kranzberg and Thomas Kuhn, had been each dedicated followers of the Dictaphone. I additionally loved meditating on the function of the dictaphone and different expertise as a mediator within the writing course of.
My analysis turned up Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse (Graywolf Press), a 1996 assortment of essays edited by the literary critic Sven Birkerts. The title comes from an anecdote concerning the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, who refused the supply of a Dictaphone as a result of it will be “too dreadfully thrilling” and would distract him from his literary pursuits. To kind the quantity, Birkerts posed inquiries to his authors regarding the place of self and soul in a society being bombarded with new types of communication—particularly, e-mail and the web.
As we speak, after all, our world is being formed by AI, arguably an excellent greater disrupter than e-mail was within the Nineties or the Dictaphone was within the early Twentieth century. However then, expertise is at all times attempting to remake society, and the trail it takes isn’t inevitable. Generally, once we’re fortunate, it’s delightfully shocking.
A part of a continuing series taking a look at historic artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of expertise.
An abridged model of this text seems within the January 2026 print subject as “This Machine Listened to ‘Dictators.’ ”
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