Parlograph
The parlograph was an early dictation device that the Swedish technician and manufacturer Carl Lindström , who lived in Berlin, developed from the phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison and manufactured it from 1910. The advertisement presented the device as a replacement for shorthand .
The parlograph had a wax cylinder and a bell for mechanical recording and playback. The roller was already powered electrically with a voltage of 110 V. From 1910 the device was sold in various European countries. Production was interrupted by the First World War. From 1916 the parlograph was also sold by the American Parlograph Corp. offered.
The writer Franz Kafka immortalized the parlograph as a grotesque instrument of torture in his story In der Strafkolonie (1914). His girlfriend Felice Bauer worked in a company that sold parlographs. In a letter from 1913, Kafka wrote jokingly to Felice: "By the way, the idea is very nice that a parlographer in Berlin goes to the phone and in Prague a gramophone and these two have a little conversation."
Individual evidence
- ↑ Franz Kafka: Letters to Felice, ed. Max Brod, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1967, p. 265