Radio in a Lollipop

The book Sweets: A History of Candy by Tim Richardson refers to the "Sound Bites Lollipop" produced by Cap Candies circa 1998, a lollipop that supposedly contained a radio. It was developed by Andrew Filo. The battery-operated device sent vibrations through the lollipop stick, so when you bit down on the candy, you could hear music inside your head via bone conduction.  That means that when you bite down on a Sound Bites lollipop vibrations travel through your teeth to your jaw bone and then inner ear, so music sounds louder inside your head.

It contained no radio (though it easily could have). There were six different versions of Sound Bites. There were three musical themes sporting guitar, drum and saxophone. Then there were three special effects versions: cartoon voices, space noises and "fun" voices. The device had four buttons that, when pushed, mix and match the sound selection. But all these was built into a "holder."  You could stick basically any lollipop into it. More here.

Press started in Februyary of 1998 following a toy fair in New York, and was distributed nationally by May,  and globally by the end of the year. It retailed for about $10. the gimmick was written up by the LA Times, New York Daily news etc.  It was trumpeted as the harbinger of the new "interactive candy" market...whatever that means.

For what it's worth Andrew Filo got the idea on a tour of the Thomas Edison Museum. Filo learned that the Edison, who was nearly deaf himself designed a device for the deaf to listen to his phonographs via a "bite bar."  The book Edison: Inventing the Century by Neil Baldwin  records a story from his daughter Madeleine "Sometimes her papa would put his teeth on the piano — literally bite it — so that the vibrations resonated through his skull bones... Edison's personal Disc Phonograph, preserved in the laboratory, also shows teeth marks on it's soft wood framework."  With 2,332 patents worldwide I've found it challenging to locate the specific patent in question but it's plausible.

There Is No Cat

When asked in 1938 to explain radio, Albert Einstein, is widely reported to have responded with the following statement:

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."  

I've also seen it attributed to Thomas Edison. Sadly all evidence indicates this quote is a hoax dating to the mid-1980s. The long animal metaphor (usually dog or cat) has been used to describe telegraphy since the 1860s.  More here.  In the year 1877 over  60 years earlier the book Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes: A Volume of Choice Telegraphic Literature, Humor, Fun, Wit & Wisdom was published in the USA. It's in the public domain and you can get it here. It records the same story more-or-less in an exaggerated Brooklynite pidgeon English. It had previously appeared in the Journal of the Telegraph in 1873.

“Now, you see, Sam, s’pose da was a dog, and dat dog’s head was in Hoboken and his tail in Brooklyn.” “Go ‘way, da ain’t no such dog.” “Well, s’pose da was.” “Well, s’pose da was.”

“Well, den de telegram is jest like dat dog. If I pinch dat dog’s tail in Brooklyn, what he do?” “Dunno.” “Why, if I pinch that dog’s tail in Brooklyn, he go bark in Hoboken. Dat’s the science"

But the quote is older than that.It dates to at least 1866 where it appears in an issue of The Telegrapher. This may be it's origin in print as it also appears word for word in The Country Gentleman & Cultivator in 1867.

“Imagine that the telegraph is an immense long dog-so long that its head is at Vienna and its tail is at Paris. Well, tread on its tail, which is at Paris, and it will bark at Vienna..."

WAAM is Radiosonic

I was reading about the recovery of a Pallophone recording, and the preservation and digitization of a broadcast by Edison on WGY-AM. [Link here.] It's fascinating, but more to the point he is not an inventor of the radio era. For all of the amazing creations on his resume (1093 patents total), most were at best, component parts by the time broadcasting was born. But late in his life, at the age of 81 he entered the radio business for the first time.

In the year 1929 the Edison Company purchased the Splitdorf-Bethlehem Electrical Company of Newark. His son Charles Edison was elected president. In that era his diamond discs had lost out big to the Berliner style discs and he'd taken a bath. Taking over Splitdorf-Bethlehem meant that Edison Co. now could produce radio-phonographs. Splitdorf-Bethlehem had working products in the pipeline and patent licenses from RCA and Hazeltine which he needed to make a competitive product. By March they were shipping new products. The first line of Edison neutrodyne radios was introduced around March 1929.

The Company was renamed "Edison Radio." The first three model numbers under that name were: R-1, R-2, C-2 and C-1. These played both lateral cut and diamond disc records. (I confirmed that in the Encyclopedia Of Recorded Sound by Frank W. Hoffmann.)  But two things were happening here. First Edison was expanding into making consumer radios. But despite his effort to make his players backwards compatible with his unpopular diamond discs The Edison Radio Co. would be out of the record business by the end of October.

It's all the more strange that in the 8 months between March and October they were still making programs for radio on long-playing discs. Radio station 1250 WAAM-AM of Newark, New Jersey, had previously agreed to use his  new "Rayediphonic" Reproducing Machine and Radiosonic records.  These special diamond discs spun at about 30 rpm. In some ways it predicted the later dominance of the vinyl LP, but it was also rooted in the old vertical cut technology that had been already doomed for 2 decades.

The first Rayediphonic broadcast was aired on WAAM April 4 1929. More here. More strangely some of these programs were saved by Edison and are were re-broadcast on WFMU on Thomas Edison's Attic. For example, WAAM's Happy Hour group had their 1928 Edison program re-aired in November of 2003. More here. I don't know how many more of these are in the archives at the Edison National Historic Site. There's one on Archive.org here.  After all that effort to maintain his empire, he died in West Orange on October 18th 1931. WAAM later merged with WODA-AM in 1934 and became WNEW-AM, a station that survives to this day.

The Weight of Media

Having recently moved and had to move my audio library I happened to notice it's really heavy. Books are heavy and records are heavy.  Cassettes are light and CDs seem light until you're stacking boxes of hundreds of them. 78s are heavy, but steel-core acetates are heaviest. So I have been thinking about large-scale digitization, and the cloud since I closed the door behind me. The cloud may have it's downside, but it'll never give you a hernia. (I am taking recommendations.)

So to that point I have begun to work out the weights of various audio media.  I have begun with a list of mostly media I already have, and I've added in a few additional sizes and types which I presently do not. rather than calculate these in some very precise minor unit I'm using a postal scale to provide the weights in units that we would all be more familiar with. (Please excuse the awkward columns)

MEDIA TYPE                                             WEIGHT
10.5 inch open reel tape, 1/4 inch and box =   33 ounces
7 inch reel-to-reel tape (1/4 inch) with box =   11 ounces
5 inch reel-to-reel tape (1/4 inch) with box =   6 ounces
Fidelipac Tape (A size)  =                               4.5 ounces
Cassette and case =                                       2 ounces
DAT with case =                                            1.5 ounces
CD in jewel case =                                         4 ounces
78 with sleeve =                                             8 ounces
Edison Diamond disc =                                  10 ounces
Edison cylinder with tube =                             6 ounces
LP with sleeve =                                             6.5 ounces
LP with gate-fold sleeve =                               7 ounces
45 with sleeve =                                              2 ounces
6.5-inch paper core acetate disc with sleeve = 1.5 ounces
6.5-inch metal core acetate disc with sleeve =  17 ounces
10-inch paper core acetate disc with sleeve =  2.5 ounces
10-inch metal core acetate disc with sleeve =   26 ounces
12-inch metal core acetate disc with sleeve =   31.5 ounces
16-inch metal core acetate disc with sleeve =   42 ounces

*scale image from PSDS images by permission.

Phonograph, Telephone and Streaming Audio

In many ways this was the first streaming music. How is this different than your modem dialing up Pandora or Live365?  Well there are a few more A-to-D conversions. But in the intervening century most of those analog components have been replaced with solid state components. The tubes, capacitors, resistors and twists of wire have been replaced with processors, but the tasks they perform are largely unchanged. So with that in mind I take you to Popular Mechanics circa 1910.

In December of 1910 Popular Mechanics published one in a string of articles about transmitting music by phone. In California, experts had transmitted music over a distance of 500 miles by telephone wire. The two-hour concert was performed in Los Angeles, and it was listened to in In San Francisco. They used "12 ordinary receivers" for the project. Within the year a Delaware company tried to take make a business out of the idea. Another notable Popular Mechanics article in 1909 described music and phone subscriptions by phone for an annual fee of $7. But the daytime programming included no requests, the day opened with news, stock prices, business etc. and military music ran from 4:30 to 6:30 PM. In the evening a subscriber could choose between opera, theater or a orchestra. But that was in Budapest.

The earliest related reference I've found was in the January 1892 issue of the "Phonogram." Edison was working on a "telephonic phonograph." It however was more of an answering machine. But by 1904 the Cahill Telephonic Company was raising money in Baltimore to attempt a telephone-based music service in America. (The company founder Thaddeus Cahill previously invented an electric keyboard-like device he called a "Dynamaphone."  It played over the phone of course.)

"It consists of a number of alternating current dynamos, all of different frequencies, producing tones of different pitch, and manipulation is by a keyboard resembling that of a piano or organ. The music Is distributed over telephone wires to any number of receivers and megaphones may be attached to the receivers."

The Dynamaphone may or may not have and anything to do with the real launch of "Phonograph Selections by Telephone"  But Cahill and his company did. You could call him the father of streaming audio. The way it worked was that a subscriber needed a "special receiver to which a phonograph horn is attached." This is not an amplifier. That was only invented a year prior by DeForest in 1909. The image above does show a wire leading to the special receiver, however there is almost no way that wire includes power. (In that era, a battery would have been much more common.) Electrical amplification then was so new, and so revolutionary, that the amplification here was almost certainly acoustic. The wire is merely a phone cord. The article goes on:

"At the central telephone exchange is a music room, which contains a number of phonographs, and an operating board to which the wires of the music subscribers are attached. each subscriber to the music service is supplied with a special directory giving names and numbers of records. When music is desired, the subscriber calls the music department on the telephone, asks for a certain record, and screws the horn into position. The music operator plugs up a free phonograph to the line, slips on a record and starts the machine. At the conclusion of the piece the connection is pulled down, unless more records have been requested."

As you can see in the second picture (below) there are a number of desk model phonographs on a counter for the ladies. The image is too grainy to guess a model. To the left are two operators, and at least 4 phonographs running, though the picture was surely staged. They could have been cylinders or discs in 1910. I cant tell for sure. While the article calls them "records" both discs and cylinders were called records in that era. At that time an Edison or a Zonophone would have been most likely. What gets me about the image is that I don't see horns. What means they were using an electromagnetic pick up of some kind to make the electrical conversion directly at the phonograph.

Pricing was per song at 3 cents per song and 7cents per operate with a minimum commitment of $18 per year. In modern dollars that works out to a total of $415.85, but that' because 3 cents in 1910 is almost $7 today. Today you can download an MP3 single for 99 cents. [Thank you inflation calculator.]  So corrected for inflation, the cost of music has gone down in the last 100 years.

INTERVIEW: Antique Phonograph Music on WFMU

This week I interviewed Michael Cumella, ak.a. MAC the host of the Antique Phonograph Music  Program at 91.1WFMU.  It runs Tuesdays at 8:00 PM. His show is one of a handful of radio shows in America that still plays music from before 1930.  Not only does he embrace the music, he plays it from the original shellac pressings, both 78 rpm platters and cylinders. His program is conducted hand-crank phonographs with mikes in the horns —and it's live. There is nothing more authentic in all of radioland. More here.

His focus on early 1920s music makes his program an anthropological statement on a lost era of music. But his commentary is so light, that he keeps the program accessible to laypeople. At the same time, his analog playback makes his program eerily similar to the programming of early experimental radio stations. The earliest broadcasts by DeForest and even Fessenden were comprised not of only of live music but of 78s played on acoustic phonographs. More here. For those of us born after 1910, this is as close as we'll ever get to the real thing.

JF: Could you describe the Antique Phonograph Music Program for a new listener.

MAC:  I play must from the acoustic era, which is roughly pre-1925, when music was recorded and played back without electricity. The recordings were played back on what you might think of as the quintessential antique: the horned phonograph or a Victrola. These were crank-up machines with a big steel needle, spring-driven motors and a very distinct sound. There’s no nostalgia for it, because anyone who listened to it in that period is dead. But, there were huge stars of that period, and also interesting kinds of music most of which are also dead. But many styles survive like blues, jazz and country. Many kinds of music debuted in that period. So it’s an interesting time in American recorded history that really doesn’t get much play anywhere. So I enjoy collecting the records and sharing this period of music with people.

JF: Care to tell me about your playback devices?

MAC: I use three machines, two disc and one cylinder phonograpg in the studio. I use a Victrola XIV, that's one of those upright machines, which you might think of with the tall cabinet with a lid and the little doors that act as volume controls. It has an internal horn. Then I use a Victor II which is an external horn machine from about 1905. Then also I use an Edison Standard that plays 2 and 4 minute cylinders.

JF: When did the program Antique Phonograph Music Program debut?

MAC: I started around 1995.

JF: Did you do any radio before WFMU?

MAC: I did one other thing on this cable channel radio thing, but that was playing rock music and other things. It was in Jersey, this guy had an audio feed going to a Public Service Announcement video channel on the local cable network. He had a feed from his basement going to the channel that went to everyone in that cable system. It was free-form. That’s fun.

JF: Did you have any connection to The Thomas Edison's Attic Program?

MAC: I knew Jerry [Fabris]. We had shows alternating weeks. He was playing super rare stuff from the Edison Archives. He had access to incredible material. He had access to sound tests, unreleased recordings, diamond disc cylinders, rare live radio recordings, and live broadcast recordings... an incredible amount of material. I play more common stuff that anyone might have gone into a record store in 1910 and bought and played on their home phonograph. My show is about playing what people might have been listening to in 1905 or 1920.

JF: You ever have technical difficulties with that antique hardware?

MAC: That’s part of the show. Sometimes I’ll be playing a record and it starts to slow down. I was having a problem with the brake last week on my show; it was kind of messing up and stopping the record in the middle. Parts break. When that happens I try to fix it and I talk it through.

JF: What gets a piece of shellac spun on your program?

MAC: I’m not really playing stuff I like all the time. Partly it’s a historical show. I’m playing music from the period. Stuff people might have bought during that period. If I’m playing say a string quartet, it’s not anything I’m really into but it’s period music. I’ve come to love zither records and there were quite a few zither records. I play ethnic music. There were a lot of ethnic groups of course immigrating to the United States at that time. I do some early electrics sometimes, but I don’t get to 1930. I get to the late 1920s. There were some cheap labels that were making acoustics in the late 20s. I’ll do some Victors from the late 20s that were electric. I definitely don’t get to the 30s. I rarely get to 1928. I want people to hear what was out there then. Some ballads are the same crappy ballads you’d hear on the radio today. The same format existed in 1905.

JF: Most of what you play is in the Public Domain then.

MAC: Mostly it is. That only goes back 75 years.

JF: what’s the oldest thing you’ve played?

MAC: An 1896 cylinder. But it wasn’t mine. It might have been a Columbia recording.

JF: Is there anything you won't play?

MAC: I used to think that about the coon songs and the nigger songs: Stuff like "If the Man in the Moon were a Coon," "Nigger Loves his Possum." People who listen to the show understand I’m playing music from the period. Here are some more records from the period that people could go into a store and buy. I don’t try to give it a big disclaimer or explain it way or talk about the historical significance of it. That’s what they were and it’s what people listened to. Actually I find the context is not negative. They’re happy. But it’s a caricature we don’t like to see, it’s a terrible stereotype but there’s no hate in it. There are Irish, German rube, and Southern [stereotype recordings] too.

JF: Is there anything you won’t play for fidelity reasons?

What I do with those is I save them. Every 2 or 3 years I’ll do a fake show as a collector who has come on and someone else will host it. I’ll be the embodiment of every cranky, odd, eccentric collector I’ve ever met or heard of. I’ll save the noisiest and most annoying records and come on and be very serious about it. I play with that whole idea. One of the last ones I did I got in a fight and broke the records and stormed out. If I find something that’s really torn up it goes in that pile.

JF: have you heard things from that era that really blew your mind?

MAC: Sure, There’s some early country music that’s been great. There is some pre-Jazz orchestra and band records that you can hear the steps between Ragtime and Jazz. I love early blues lady singers, Bessie Smith is of the period. There are some other early Blues women who are really fantastic. Eubie Blake had a fantastic Band.  W.C. Handy was also fantastic. I also personally like early yodeling records. I have some German acoustic yodeling records. It’s not like what you think of yodeling. This is coming out of Austria in 1915.

JF: How do you put together a show playlist then?

MAC: I don’t put a tremendous amount of thought into it. Sometimes I’ll put things aside, or if I bough some new records I’ll play that. I usually do it in sets: some blues, some country, some instrumentals…I’ll do 3 or four of each. It’s only an hour show so that’s about 15 or 16 records. What’s happened in the last few years is that I’ve been asked to do appearances so I’ll go out and DJ with two horned phonographs. I enjoy doing it. I like getting people’s feedback.

Edison's Lab

This is a photograph taken by Lloyd Grimstead on October 15th 1911 of Thomas Edison's laboratory. On the left is the lab, on the right is an office building. In 1928 Henry Ford moved the complex to Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan where it was reconstructed as an exhibit.
You can read about Mr. Grimstead here. Grimstead supported himself in the great depression selling photo post cards door-to-door. The Metuchen-Edison Historical Society currently possesses these negatives who reprinted the above picture as a post card which is how I am able to share it today. Their site is here.

Thomas Edison was 64 when this picture was taken. It was also the year of his now famous Columbian Magazine Interview.

Re-inventing the alphabet

The very first ticker just displayed numbers for the price of gold. That little device was invented by Mr. S.S. Laws. It was called the gold indicator. But mere months later Thomas Edison invented what was the true grandfather of our modern device. More here.

It seems counter intuitive but Edison's telegraph printed characters on paper tape.The printer was invented with his device, not after. It was only later that wireless operators would learn to read the dots and dashes directly. In the early 1900s, as the volume of telegraph messages created the need to print more quickly; the dots and dashes weren't optimal.So in the early 1900s operators saw new printing telegraph devices (tickers) promising to increase printing speed! this was acheived two ways which in the end are somewhat related. More here.

1. More efficient printers:

This was usually done by minimizing mechanical movement. But new materials and more complicated spring-loaded mechanisms shaved off seconds.

2. Simpler sets of letterforms:

This reduced the amount of movement that the printing elements had to make. Simpler units were lighter, cheaper and potentially faster on paper.

These systems use the dots and dashes of Morse code to instruct the printing of letter forms. Few if any of these novel alphabets were used, as printers became at least adequately faster mechanically . Ultimately it was only the transmission of ascii signals to dot matrix printers that in 1961 finally revolutionized the old system. None-the-less these old ideas are interesting indeed.

Phenol, Edison, Bayer and Records

Phenol, also known under an older name of carbolic acid, is a toxic, colourless crystalline solid with a sweet tarry odor. Its chemical formula is C6H5OH. It's solubility in water is limited, it's slightly acidic and is normally made from the partial oxidation of benzene. It's also a byproduct of coal oxidation. So far just a random chemical right?

Phenol is used in a few common products: Aspirin, phonograph records, and TNT. When you think about it, these are just three random products in a long list of things that include Phenol as an ingredient. but at the wrong time, the three can be in strong competition if Phenol is in short supply. ...Say World War One.

Cylinders peaked in popularity about 1905. but by 1912 the record was picking up popularity. Edison wanted to compete but he didn't want to import shellac from Asia. They invented an early phenol-polymer the predecessor to Bakelite. Edison mixed phenol and formaldehyde with with wood-flour and a solvent. This new composite material made the core of the disc. This was then coated with a phenolic resin varnish called Condensite. The finished 10" disc weighed ten ounces, heavier than most, partially due to the 1/4" thickness of the record. Today records are made form PVC but until 1912 it was all shellac. (The Edison 1o-inch did require a switch from a steel needle to a diamond needle)

Bayer had the US patent on Aspirin. Aspirin was a brand name. Prior to Aspirin bayer mostly made industrial dyes. The chemical is actually named Acetyl Salicylic Acid. They used Phenol to make it. Circa WWI Aspirin was a wonder drug. It was an all-purpose analgesic, and fever-reducer that didn't cause stomach irritation like it's predecessors. And it wasnt' an addictive narcotic like Heroin and Morphine which were both available by prescription at the time. All three were used on troops in WWI. More here.

Bayer was feeling the pinch of the short Phenol supply during WWI because Britain and the U.S. State Department was buying most of the international supply whole sale to bomb Germany flat. At the same time that created a shortage of aspirin, but back home it was restricting the press runs of records. NO RECORDS! OH NO! More here.

Edison wasn't going to stand for that. In 1915 the clever devil started making about 12 tons of Phenol per day. He only needed 9 tons for his records, so he started selling the balance of 3 tons to Bayer. This was a good deal for Bayer since they just turned around and sold most of their aspirin to the military. But then it came out that some Bayer executives were involved with some spies at the German embassy! So the State department stepped in took over the board of Bayer since it was foreign owned and the war was ramping up anyway. They also took away their phenol and began allowing US firms to make aspirin without the patent license, essentially dissolving the Bayer patent.... Edison just kept making records.

Phenol was also used to execute people, an oral antiseptic, and actually was an ingredient in Bakelite™, a synthetic resin that was later used in the 1930s in the chassis of tabletop radios.

The Record Player

I have written about parts of the history of records many times. I covered the invention of shellac, paraffin, vinyl and all the speeds at which they spin. Today I cover the history of the record player that spun them round and round, the turntable. The device has been changed a lot by many different pairs of hands so I'll just his some highlights...

When Edison first invented audio recording, it was on a wax cylinder. (as opposed to when other engineers invented it) From the start, the recording device was also a playback device. It was hand-cranked and for all intents and purposes is was the great grandfather of all such devices that followed it. But like all things, the beta is many steps short of the production model.

It had huge design flaws, including irregular playing speed, the labor of manual cranking, and the wear that irregular torque can have on motorized parts and steel needles wore out quickly. It had no amplification, and was thus difficult to hear and the fidelity... well, it was the best there was at the time and it worked. It worked well enough that thousands of Americans were willing to turn the crank to wind it up. A battery-driven model didn't debut until 1887.

But Edison didn't patent the record player. Even though he had developed the cylinder, it was Alexander Graham Bell ( who was working on a similar model.) Bell made it to the patent office first in 1876. But at that time Edison wasn't seeing it's future too clearly. He still saw it as an office dictation machine. It wasn't until 1890 that he began to record musicians with the intent to sell pre-recorded music. But lacking a patent never slowed down Edison. He kept at it, and his name was on patents for almost every improvement to the device for the next three decades.

He added the aforementioned battery, then in 1895 Edison added a horn to amplify the signal. It was to be the only amplification until 1925 when electrical amplification as invented. The significance can't be emphasized enough. Previous to the horn, the records were essentially only listened to on headphones. More here.

The including irregular playing speed plagued the device until Emile Berliner worked on improving the playback machine with Elridge Johnson. Elridge Johnson patented a spring motor for the Berliner gramophone. The motor made the turntable revolve at an even speed and there was no more hand cranking. The spring was wound and then the record played. More here

It was this version that played records for us on the earliest experimental radio stations. But thank goodness it wasn't the one we were stuck with. Models continued to improve.  In my radio days, I used an old 3-speed direct drive GE model. But at the end the Technics 1200 had replaced it as that third speed (78 rpm) became totally unnecessary.

The Paraffin Recording...

There was audio recording Before vinyl, even before. We've gotten used to plastic as a recording medium. It's in the cassette tape backing, their shells, reel-to-reel spools, the PVC plastic 12-inches of the 1970s... Vinyl before that... and shellac 78's and cylinders before that. I have written about early recording media before, I'll try not to repeat myself here.

Early experimental media included wood, thin metallic tape, graphite, and some slightly more ridiculous things. The first was actually paraffin coated paper. He made only one reference to it in his US [No. 200,521] patent: "The material employed for this purpose may be soft paper saturated or coated with paraffin or similar material, with a sheet of metal foil on the surface thereof to receive the impression from the indenting point." For the record paraffin is also used in making wax paper, for sealing cheese, as a solid propellant, as a moisturizer etc.

In 1877 Thomas Edison patented a simple machine that could crudely record and replay sound. The recording was made with a device similar to what we use today: a stylus attached to a diaphragm. but the recording media was a strip of paraffin wax coated paper. That strip of paper was slid under the stylus while Edison shouted into the speaker. it's vibrations left an indentation in the paper. As the paper was pulled back under the stylus his voice could be heard faintly.

But as a recording medium it was terrible. At room temperature it gets brittle cant be carved without chipping. In his British patent [No. 1,644] he actually spelled out the paraffin problem: "The indentation can now be made in the foil, and the paraffin or similar material, and the indenting point, does not become clogged with the paraffin in consequence of the intervening foil." So why did he use it? Probably because had some on hand already. Pure paraffin is an effective electrical insulator, with a resistance of 1017 ohms per meter. This is really only second to plastic. In that era paraffin was used to coat electrical wires as insulation; something that was needed constantly in the Edison workshop. It was later that Edison decided that while a poor recording media, paraffin was good for wrapping candies and foods. He went on to invent wax paper.

from history.sandiego.edu

Within a year the prototype became a true phonograph. It's new recording media was a cylinder covered with tin foil. It was rotated by a hand cranked screw. Edison did not bother to patent the paraffin-coated paper. No one thought to patent it until 2004! It's #6833025 if it interests you.

Paraffin was discovered by Baron Dr. Karl Ludwig von Freiherr Reichenbach in 1830. He was known in his day as a chemist, metallurgist and philosopher. He also discovered kerosene and the antiseptic phenol. He was also big on crystals which is why the larger body of his work is ignored. He first rendered it from wood tar. In that era it was not yet discovered that it would be distilled from petroleum. Reichenbach performed a series of tests on the new substance and found it was generally inert. On account that nature he gave the material its name from the Latin parum, too little, and finitas, affinity).

Paraffin was later obtained in 1830 by the distillation of bituminous schist, and in 1835 from coal-tar; but the inert product was largely regarded as a curiosity. An efficient system for distilling paraffin from bituminous coals was patented in 1850 by Dr James Young. In this era it's primary use was as paraffin oil, for lamps. No one then had any inkling it would later carry the imprint of sound.