Charles Sumner Tainter

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Charles Sumner Tainter

Charles Sumner Tainter (born April 25, 1854 in Watertown , Massachusetts , † April 20, 1940 in San Diego , California ) was an American instrument maker, engineer and inventor who, in collaboration with Alexander Graham Bell and Chichester Alexander Bell, made significant improvements to the Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph and is considered one of the fathers of the graphophone .

Life

Early years

Charles Summer Tainter was born on April 25, 1854 to Abigail and Georg Tainter, an inventor and holder of various patents, in Watertown, Massachusetts. He attended the local public school without much enthusiasm and, after its completion, began to educate himself in those areas which appeared to him most interesting. For this purpose, Tainter visited the local library and began to study the existing technical literature there. In particular , according to his memoirs, the popular scientific journal Scientific American influenced him to direct his thoughts in a mechanically scientific direction.

In 1870, Tainter began his professional career with a Boston -based company run by Charles Williams Jr. , which manufactured electrical appliances and telephones. Two years later he moved to another Boston-based company, staying until 1873, when, after its closure, he took a job at Alvan Clark and Sons , a well-known manufacturer of optical instruments and telescopes from Cambridge , Massachusetts . During his five years with the company, Tainter supported the construction of the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, and developed the transit of Venus on December 8, 1874 for an expedition of the US government, which had set itself the goal observed in the South Pacific, various research equipment.

Four years later, in 1878, Tainter founded his own company in Cambridge to begin building scientific instruments. Accepting the offer from Alexander Graham Bell, whose acquaintance he had previously made when he manufactured electrical equipment for it, Tainter moved to Washington, DC, in 1879, to jointly set up a small research laboratory with him and henceforth to work with the Edisonian " Tin foil phonograph ", in English Tin Foil Phonograph, to employ after he and Bell, by his father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard , such a device was made available for experimental purposes. Tainter also began to devote himself to telephonic signal transmission using light, as a result of which the photophone could be tested for the first time in 1880. After various publications in the press related to the invention of the telephone, this gained a high level of awareness, due to which Bell traveled to France in the spring of the same year to receive the Volta Prize , awarded by the French Académie des Sciences to receive for his work in this regard.

The Volta Laboratory Associates

In the following year, 1881, Bell founded the Volta Laboratory in Georgetown , Washington DC , with a donation of 10,000 US dollars - 50,000 francs - for the award of the Volta Prize , in which his cousin Chichester Bell and Tainter pursued their research alongside himself which mainly served to improve the phonograph.

Phonograph rolls

Smithsonian Box

Graphophone

It was possible to improve the graphophone to a considerable extent and to bring about further inventions, for which Tainter was granted own and joint patents, which would shape the speaking machine industry for the future. Furthermore, the research activities resulted in the graphophone, the first commercially usable drum player.

Late years

Tainter, who continued to live in Washington, DC and worked on the further development of the graphophone, in order to use it as a dictation machine for commercial use, married Lila R. Munro in 1886 and participated in various companies in the following years dedicate to the manufacture and sale of various types of graphophone devices. These included, for example, the Volta Graphophone Company, later the American Graphophone Company, and the International Graphophone Company, which Tainter founded in 1889 during a trip to Europe to win the Ordre des Palmes Académiques of the French government at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris for the invention of the graphophone to receive.

After his return from Europe and further development work on the Graphophone, the complications of a pneumonia that he had contracted in 1888 while setting up the production facility of the American Graphophone Company caused him new problems. Despite these adverse circumstances, Tainter managed to produce and display one hundred graphophones for the Chicago World Fair in 1893. For health reasons, Tainter began to travel along the Mediterranean, Canada and Alaska to improve his health. After a fire in 1897 that destroyed his laboratory, he continued to work on one of his last patents from his home in Washington DC, visiting various sanatoriums in search of relief from his ailments.

In 1903 Tainter and his wife moved to San Diego, California, where she passed away in 1924 and Tainter married Laura F. Onderdonk four years after her death in 1928. After receiving various honors for his life's work, including at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco , Charles Sumner Tainter died at the age of 86 on April 20, 1940 in his adopted home San Diego, California.

Services

Charles Sumner Tainter, along with Alexander Graham Bell and his cousin Chichester A. Bell, is considered to be one of the fathers of the graphophone, as he was instrumental in its development. The same applies to the specialization of the graphophone into a dictation machine, which was later offered for rent and purchase. Tainter is also responsible for improving the recording and playback quality of speaking machines. He developed the first wax cylinder, which was able to write the emitted sound completely into the sound carrier.

Patents

Patent number Patent name Registered Released Patent holder
US-235496 Photophonic transmitter 1880 1880 Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter
US-235497 Selenium Cells 1880 1880 Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter
US-235616 Process Of Treating Selenium To Increase Its Electric Conductivity 1880 1880 Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter
US-241909 Photophonio Receiver 1881 1881 Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter
US-336173 Telephone transmitter 1885 1886 Charles Sumner Tainter
US-341212 Reproducing Sounds from Phonograph Records 1885 1886 Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester A. Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter
US-341213 Transmitting and recording sounds by radiant energy 1884 1886 Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester A. Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter
US-341214 Recording and Reproducing Speech and Other Sounds 1885 1886 Chichester A. Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter
US-341288 Apparatus for Recording and Reproducing Sounds 1885 1886 Charles Sumner Tainter
US-374133 Paper Cylinder for Graphophonic Records 1887 1887 Charles Sumner Tainter
US-375579 Apparatus for Recording and Reproducing Speech and Other Sounds 1887 1887 Charles Sumner Tainter
US-380535 Graphophone 1887 1888 Charles Sumner Tainter
US-421450 Graphophone Tablet 1887 1890 Charles Sumner Tainter
US-428646 Machine for the Manufacture of Wax-coated Tablets for Graphophones 1889 1890 Charles Sumner Tainter

Awards and honors

literature

  • Herbert Jüttemann :  Phonographen und Grammophone , 4th edition, Funk-Verlag Hein, Dessau 2007, ISBN 978-3-939197-17-1 .
  • Walter L. Welch, Leah Brodbeck Stenzel Burt:  From Tinfoil to Stereo - The Acoustic Years of the Recording Industry 1877-1929 , University Press of Florida Florida 1994, ISBN 0-8130-1317-8

Web links

Commons : Charles Sumner Tainter  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hear My Voice - Alexander Graham Bell and the Origins of Recorded Sound. Smithsonian - Albert H. Small Documents Gallery, accessed August 9, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Tainter, Charles Sumner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American inventor
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1854
PLACE OF BIRTH Watertown , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH April 20, 1940
Place of death San Diego , California