Edison Cylinder Phonograph Vs. Hey, You

If you look anywhere on TV or online, you can most likely see an advert for a new type of technology. There is always something new coming out, whether it’s a new phone or a pair of headphones. You usually point out ‘Woah, that looks cool. I want it! It looks better than my own!’. But what if there were no commercials for those products? Without advertising you might have never known that it existed. Marketing and creating products now and then are very similar. In the articles “The Incredible Talking Machine”, “The History of the Edison Cylinder Phonograph”, and “Psst… Hey, You”, the authors explain how marketing and the development of technology is important to getting their products purchased. In the first two articles about Thomas Edison’s

But the way they wanted to improve was to look back at other inventions and see a way they could make their own machine better than the last. In the first article “The Incredible Talking Machine” by Ebsco, the author writes “To him, the idea that his most cherished invention faced competition was unendurable.” That quote means that when Edison finally decided to start working on creating a new phonograph, he became jealous that other people were taking his invention and making it their own. They inventors of the improved phonograph looked at Edison’s work and decided to find a way to make their product better. In the article “Psst… Hey You”, the author, Mark Fischetti, describes how Joseph Pompei got his idea to create an audio system that only lets one listener hear the audio at a time. Fischetti writes “Military and sonar researchers tried to harness the phenomenon as far back as the 1960’s but only managed to generate highly distorted audible signals. In 1998 Joseph Pompei.. Published algorithms that cut the distortion to only a few percent.” That means Pompei took the research and product created by the military to make his own audio machine better than what was first created. In the article “The History of Edison’s Cylinder Phonograph” the author writes “Eventually, the novelty of the invention wore off for the public, and Edison did no further work on the

Even though they wanted to get a lot of their products sold, they were both very expensive. A novelty even. Edison’s phonograph was meant for the everyday people, but not everyone could afford it and it constantly broke down. In “The Incredible Talking Machine”, Ebsco writes “The company introduced a toy model that functioned badly and a second, more expensive one that was used by show-business entrepreneurs who rented concert halls… it broke down frequently and required a trained technician’s constant attention.” What this is saying is that the phonograph was mainly used by wealthy businessmen but it also needed constant repairs. In “The History of Edison’s Cylinder Phonograph”, they write “As a novelty, the machine was an instant success, but was difficult to operate except by experts..” Edison’s machine was popular among people who could afford it, but as stated earlier, it needed constant attention because of how often it broke down. In “Psst… Hey You”, Fischetti writes “But the primary obstacle to wider deployment is cost: systems can run from $600 to $1,000 or more.” Pompei’s Audio Spotlight also happened to run on the expensive side so it wasn’t used that often except by big corporations like Disney theme parks. Cost has always been an issue for products, especially groundbreaking ones like