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网上搜的Patent Pool
It was in 1902 that the phonograph record reached maturity, with the great pooling of patents that combined the advantages of all the systems and allowed the entire industry to benefit equally. But even then the cylinder record was far from dead. During the period of Berliner's continued experimenting, the original two-cylinder systems had developed and multiplied commercially into a considerable business. New companies with impressive names were formed, merged, or were bought out, or died - names that to most of us today are entirely familiar. The "North American Phonograph Company" for a time combined sales of both the Edison phonograph and the Bell-Tainter graphophone, since the similarity of the two machines continued. In 1896 Edison, who was a businessman and financier when he had a mind to be, bought back the whole cylinder business for himself, forming the "National Phonograph Company" (corporation names then, as now, ran to impressive adjectives!), and began for the first time to take an interest in music for recording purposes, his earlier interest having been largely in speech, the dictating-machine aspect. (Berliner, however, had a good musical ear and had been inclined toward music from the very beginning of his experiments.)
Edison had solved the clockwork problem more easily than Berliner, for the mechanical problems were simpler with the cylinder type of movement. But one immense obstacle persisted for several years: duplication of cylinder records. The simple plating and stamping process used with the Berliner disks could not be adapted to the more complicated shape of the cylinder, though frantic experiments continued. while Berliner turned out duplicated quantities of his noisy zinc-etched records, the better-sounding wax-engraved cylinders were still being made and sold individually via the old sing-it-and-sing-it-again process, a handful at a time!
Intense efforts to do something about this disastrous situation led first to a makeshift pantograph system of copying, which allowed three or four cylinders to be engraved simultaneously. It figured in an amusing incident when an artist who was being paid to do his piece a dozen or so times over, making a single record each time, happened to notice a large tray filled with cylinders being carried away, all labeled with his own just-recorded selection. The economy-minded manufacturer had thought to use the new duplicator undetected, to multiply his too-meager profits to the artist's expense.
But this was a stopgap. Not until after the turn of the century did the cylinder makers finally surmount the technical difficulties of plating and pressing a cylinder record, thus making cylinder duplication possible - though too late - on a par with Berliner's disk duplication. But still the cylinder had flourished. |
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发表于 2011-10-30 18:59:05
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