John Black, age 73, CAPS member for over 25 years, passed away April 28th after a brief illness.

An interior designer by trade, he began his hobby in the 1950’s collecting early jazz recordings on shellac. As his collection grew and after he had moved from Toronto to Kingston he began to send out auctions of interesting and rare recordings. Soon after, he opened his store in Toronto "One More Time" dealing in 78’s and LP’s and other musical ephemera. Before long, he was also collecting machines.

He found pleasure in early Berliners, operatic recordings and jazz; along with front mount machines. As a former editor of the CAPS newsletter he wrote many articles still available in the archives! He looked forward to CAPS meetings. The monthly meetings were one event he missed after moving to Vancouver.

In the past few years, his passions became listening to music, playing snooker and painting. He leaves behind former CAPS president Lynda Black to keep the machines wound up and the music upbeat!

Many thanks to all the CAPS members who have shared their remembrances with the family.

After the advent of "Victor Day" on Monday, November 2, 1925, the accepted thinking about the nature and format of the garden variety talking machine was forever changed. No longer was the public, which was already embracing the home radio receiver in ever increasing numbers, content with the essentially Edwardian upright Victrola. They were not necessarily deserting the phonograph field but were decidedly restive over the long reign of a mechanical record player that had been bestowed with only incremental and largely cosmetic betterments over the course of nearly twenty years! It was not that the sound of early radios was luring them away; in fact, many early radio horns had more limited output than even a minor league phonograph. The appeal of apparently endless and costfree entertainment, with no spring-winding chores, needles to misplace or fragile disks to break, proved of immense appeal; strong enough to challenge the talking machines’ long hold on domestic entertainment.

No. If the talking machine were to survive, two paths had to be taken. One, to "civilize the beast" by making radio simply a part of a "combination" instrument. Two, to better the sound of the talking machine so that its appeal would be strengthened and its traditional patronage regained. The Victor Orthophonic line admirably accomplished both these goals and literally gave Victor a new lease on life. One of the features of the new Orthophonic instruments was its soundbox, like nothing previously offered by Victor or any other firm.

In this short piece we will therefore examine this soundbox and its effect on design thinking among competing manufacturers, in the general quest to update and improve talking machine technology in the "Phonic Era".

Beginning Remarks

A talking machine is nothing more, from an engineering standpoint, than a mechanical loud-speaking telephone transmitting a recorded message. Given the underlying and fundamental similarities of these two devices, Western Electric engineers were able, using circuit analogy design precepts, to reconfigure the standard upright phonograph into a form that made the fullest and most efficient use of its given size and features. When the outside-horn machines of the earliest gramophone era began to be replaced by insidehorn cabinet instruments, we had, in the words of Compton Mackenzie of Gramophone fame, "acoustics subordinated to cabinet work". In essence, for nearly two decades Victor and its competitors sold what has been dismissively called "phono-furniture".

Then, with the design work on an "improved mechanical phonograph" begun at Western Electric in 1922 by a small team led by Henry C. Harrison and including Paul B. Flanders, Edward L. Norton and Theodore Osmer, with substantial input from loudspeaker pioneer Albert L Thuras, the cabinet-enclosed talking machine was not rejected but instead raised to a lofty level of applied acoustic engineering. Aside from the greatly enlarged horn, calculated to precise logarithmic formulas, the outstanding feature of the new Orthophonic line was its vastly bettered soundbox.

Brief Engineering Basics

A soundbox is a mechanical transducer, which converts the potential energy engraved into the wavy spiral groove of the disk into kinetic energy, by the agency of the record spinning under its needle-arm assembly. This movement of the needle-arm or stylus bar, in essence a pivoted armature, is transferred to the diaphragm which, fastened securely to the armature, must necessarily itself move in concert with the imparted groove modulations. Now, the area behind the diaphragm, enclosed by the outer wall of the backplate, causes the soundbox to act like a compression-type loud speaker, meaning that the armature/diaphragm assembly works into this enclosed and deliberately constricted space, in the fashion of an air pump, forcing wave motion from the backplate through the throat and into the tone arm, where it is channelled into the horn assembly. The horn (and the tone arm in talking machines with a tapered arm, like the Victor and Victrola) acts as a coupling between the soundbox and the air within the room. It does this by being a gradually expanding chamber that transforms the incoming sound waves of small size and high velocity into outgoing larger waves of slower velocity. At this point the sound waves leave the horn mouth and radiate into the surrounding air. A horn therefore, no matter what its size or shape, depends upon being driven by the soundbox, itself a mechanical analog to a loud speaker motor. If the soundbox is poorly designed or otherwise inefficient as a transducing or converting agent, the output of its associated horn will likewise be poor.

In the mechanical period (sometimes called the "acoustic era"), the customary soundbox employed a diaphragm made of mica (micaschist), a natural geologic substance easily split or cloven into thin plates suitable for the purpose. This occurred before the development of reliable plastics, so the early gramophone engineers can hardly be faulted for the choice. However, from the standpoint of sound transmission, the mica-equipped soundbox has several drawbacks. One, a given mica disk itself has only so much mechanical compliance or yield factor. Too thin a disk will not hold up under repeated use and will necessarily be prone to damage and distortion. Two, the need to securely clamp the mica disk both for positional stability and to prevent air leaks around the gaskets, further limits its compliance. Three, the clamping pressure used tended to either raise or lower the natural vibrational period or periods of the mica disk, adding unpleasant resonances to the frequency band of interest. Four, the mica diaphragm is driven at one point only, where it was attached to the needle-arm. This tends to produce a diaphragm action that bends the mica disk mostly at its center, with movement falling off as it reaches the periphery. Such an action might be sufficient for reproducing the customary acoustically recorded disk, with its rather limited frequency and dynamic range, but is unsuitable for transmitting input from an electrically cut record.

An Early High Compliance SoundBox

Joseph P. Maxfield, an MIT graduate hired, along with colleague H. C. Harrison, by Dr. Frank Baldwin Jewett into Western Electric in 1914, had witnessed for patent on August 23, 1917, an improved soundbox designed with much higher compliance than the garden variety mica- equipped models. Its diaphragm, of differential thickness made (like those patented by an older Western Electric inventor Henry C. Egerton for Western Electric loudspeakers) from molded fabric, was not only of better yield characteristics, but had less annoying resonances as well. The diaphragm of this early Maxfield soundbox, like those designed by H. C. Egerton, had a thicker center portion for "plunger" action, and a thinner outer periphery for long excursion properties. The salient features of this soundbox, although embodied in forms different from the later Harrison-authored diaphragm, no doubt influenced the latter’s thinking in terms of performance goals.

The prevailing model customarily employed by acoustic scientists of this period was that of a straight pipe or tube driven by a diaphragm acting as an infinitely smooth piston. This theoretical tube produced no wave-form distortion either at the driving end or at the open end. Sound conducted through this tube was to be an orderly succession of perfect planar waves, which obviously existed only in laboratory studies, not in the rough and tumble of the commercial talking machine world! Henry Harrison found, however, that if a body intermediate between needle-arm attachment point and diaphragm were introduced, the diaphragm tended to act with much more plunger action, like the ideal piston. This interposed body or structure tended to spread out the motion from the armature, affording the desired broader action in the diaphragm, which in turn caused more air to be displaced compared to the center-biased mica disk. This was especially critical in the transmission of lower frequencies or bass, just like the wide excursion cone speakers of the upcoming Electrola and Panatrope models, then also in development. Thus was born the spider of the eventual Orthophonic soundbox that in turn led to the cone intermediate element of the Brunswick soundbox and the dome structure of the Columbia VivaTonal models!

Better Diaphragm Materials

It was not enough, however, just to place an additional structural member before the main diaphragm. Even with such a structure, whether spider, cone or dome, the elastic limits of mica could not have been overcome. What was needed was a new material, thin enough for compliance yet reasonably free from unwanted bending and "billowing". Egerton and Maxfield chose fabric strengthened with phenolic, a good choice for low resonance during their gestation period of 1916-1917. However, there was another telephone tradition which could lend itself to the cause. Aluminium diaphragms had been used in telephone handsets years before, and in the early 1920s, during the Harrison investigations, a relatively new aluminium alloy called duralumin (known technically as alloy 17 S-T) made with 4% copper, 0.5% manganese and an equal measure of magnesium, came into industrial usage. This alloy proved to have the ideal properties sought by Harrison, namely strength combined with flexibility. After the advent of the Orthophonic line in the fall of 1925, Victor’s chief rivals, Brunswick and Columbia, followed suit, discarding without regret their micaequipped soundboxes in favor of formed light alloy diaphragms. In our next instalment we will examine the particular features of each of these soundboxes, to determine how they bettered the performance of the new lines of large-horn mechanical disk instruments.

Concluding Note:

This researcher would like to thank Mr. Keith Wright for encouraging me to write this brief soundbox piece and for featuring it in this fine publication. Most of the data in this article was adapted from my book-in-preparation, The Orthophonic Victrola in Word and Picture, specifically the chapters entitled "Henry Harrison and His Talking Machine World" and "Competing Machines" Readers wishing to learn more about talking machine acoustics are encouraged, if they have not already done so, to visit the outstanding Victor-Victrola Page maintained by my correspondent Paul C. Edie. Mr. Edie, an acoustic engineer of wide learning and deep understanding, features an invaluable chapter entitled "An Introduction To Vibro- Acoustics" that should be required reading for any serious talking machine collector!

Advertisement from Blanco y Negro, April 6, 1901. The Bettini reproducer is mentioned at center-right.

In January of 1899, The Phonoscope declared: "Lieutenant Bettini is a well-known feature in New York, and by his inventive gift has acquired a world-famed reputation." It was more likely fortune than fame which he sought, but in any case, Bettini envisioned spreading his phonograph business to many lands. With that goal in mind, he worked diligently to develop connections in Spain.

Bettini apparently looked to Spain very early on in his career as an inventor, for he patented his original "spider" attachments in that country on August 15, 1889. The date of Spanish Patent No. 9926, which translates to "Apparatus for the Recording and Reproduction of Sounds," was just two days after his first three patents for recorders and reproducers were issued in the United States. He obtained an additional talking machine patent in Spain, No. 21381 of August 25, 1897, for "Improvements in Phonographs." There may be others.

The lieutenant also made personal visits there. For example, in Seville the newspaper El Noticiero Sevillano of November 22, 1895 noted (in translation): "The chairman of Bettini Micro-phonographs has been established for the last two months on Sierpes Street, and will remain for a few weeks longer in our city. To the already long collection of records (cylinders) he has available to the public, a new one will be added that will leave for posterity the 'malaguenas' of the famous singer Juan Breva."

Juan Breva

Breva was the premier interpreter of Malagastyle Flamenco music, and as it was probably Bettini who first captured his renditions on wax, the lieutenant may well have pioneered recording malaguenas. The Juan Breva Museum opened in Malaga in 1958, and it is known to have antique phonographs, cylinders, and at least one Bettini-related machine. I have not yet determined, however, whether the recordings it has were ones captured by Lieutenant Bettini, or if its phonographs were manufactured by him. What is exhibited there may simply be a Bettini attachment or attachments.

Bettini is known to have returned to Spain some two years later, and in Madrid, the October 19, 1897 edition of the magazine, El Cardo wrote (again in translation): "At a meeting this night, having arrived from Paris and New York, the distinguished Italian cavalry officer, Mr. Bettini, inventor of the famous diaphragm that carries his name, has put his apparatus on an Edison phonograph that amused everyone and that was important for its successful playing. Mr. Bettini has received constant declarations of proof from both scientific people and amateurs that without the Bettini attachments the Edison phonograph is merely a child’s toy. Mr. Bettini was in the Hotel de Roma where he gave a banquet which was attended by his representative Mr. A. Hugens, the Marquis of Alta Villa and Tovar, Drs. Casal and Drillos, Messers Luis Coll, Porfirio Carcases, Mabou, Dessy Martos, Dusmet and others that I haven’t noted. After the banquet there was much joy when Bettini offered to send some phonographic firsts to Spain. The diners moved then to the phonograph cabinet…and feasted at hearing the precious cylinders and the reproduction of the Mass by machine…and they contemplated the next great improvement to the wonderful device. Mr. Bettini was much enchanted with Madrid and the people of Madrid."

The Bettini speed indicator as it appeared on a page of the 1900 catalogue of Sociedad Fonografica Espanola-Hugens y Acosta.

The above report has substantiated that by 1897, Bettini was already dealing with Mr. Hugens, proprietor of the large phonograph firm of Hugens y Acosta, Barquitto 3, Duplicado, in Madrid. Three years later, that company issued a profusely-illustrated catalogue which liberally borrowed the style and actual graphics of those directly published by the lieutenant in the U.S.A. and France A photographic portrait of Bettini even appeared on its third page. This 1900 catalogue sold Bettini cylinders (no Juan Breva recordings appeared in it), recorders, reproducers, horns, and speed indicators. And while not listed, Hugens y Acosta also distributed complete French Bettini-made machines, including a No. 1 and a No. 2, now in Spain, which have survived the passage of time.

From April through December of 1901, under the heading of their corporate title of Sociedad Fonografica Espanola, Hugens y Acosta also ran a series of identical advertisements in the Madrid-based weekly, Blanco y Negro. Bettini’s name was shown twice near the center of these broadsides, with capitalized text announcing the sale of: "DIAPHRAGMES BETTINI" and urging readers to "oidos por el reproductor Bettini ... hear the Bettini reproducer" (see illustration). There is also some evidence suggesting that Hugens y Acosta exported Bettini products to Mexico and possibly Argentina. The business connection between the inventor and Mr. A. Hugens was close and mutually advantageous.

An advertisement by the Madrid firm of Aramburo, with a mention of the Bettini diaphragm, from Nuevo Mundo, Dec. 12, 1901.

But Hugens y Acosta was not the only retailer marketing Bettini’s product line in Madrid. The important phonograph store, Aramburo, of 12 Principe was also selling it. An Aramburo advertisement in Nuevo Mundo of December 12, 1900 is one of the illustrations I have chosen for this article. It vaunted the "Diaphragma Bettini, legitimos," in a reference to the fact that Pathé had been manufacturing its so-called "Systeme Bettini" without authorization from the lieutenant.

Among the Spaniards who much admired Lieutenant Bettini’s phonographic achievements was Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal, winner of the 1906 Nobel Prize in Medicine for establishing neurons as basic units of the body’s nervous system. That prominent scientist, himself, had dabbled in trying to improve talking machines and his autobiography, Recollections of My Life, gives us a concise summary of Bettini’s importance in the emerging Spanish recording industry: "I wished to become acquainted with the new industrial inventions ... …and to examine ... the new improvements of the phonograph and gramophone, with the advances introduced into the brilliant invention of Edison by the Italian Bettini ...In 1895 and 1896, the Edison phonograph and its variants (the graphophone… and the famous amplifying diaphragms of Bettini) made a furor in Madrid. Thanks to the active propaganda of the Frenchman...Hugens, and especially to the sales facilities of the firm of Aramburo, which was like the casino of the enthusiasts for the cylinder, the cult of the phonograph spread like an epidemic, attacking even those who, like me, were always refractory to the enchantments of music." Bettini had made a major impact.

I would like to thank Mariano Gomez Montejano (author of the excellent book, El Fonografo en Espana...Cilindoros Espanoles), Allen Koenigsberg, Francisco Segalvera, the Archivo Oriz Nuevo, and Curro Aix, for their help.