Expect the Unexpected

One of the most surprising things about discovery is how easily overlooked some breakthroughs are. When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, it was nothing more than an absent-minded off-handed comment during an after-hours diversion. And after his team proved the idea could work, they didn’t miss a beat, but continued right on working on the “real” focus of their labor: perfecting a diaphragm for a telephone. It wasn’t until months later that they realized what they had done.

I wanted to share the story as it unfolds chronologically in Randall Stross’s The Wizard of Menlo Park, simply to highlight how overlookable one of the singular moments of invention in history was at the time of its arrival:

“On July 18, 1877, when the midnight dinner had been consumed but the men had not yet disbursed to return to the work of comparing different types of diaphragms for the telephone, Edison entertained himself speaking into one, while pressing his finger on the rear surface, feeling the vibrations. After a while, he turned around to face Batchelor (his assistant) and casually remarked, ‘Batch, if we had a point on this we can make a record on some material which we could afterwords pull under the point, and it would give us the speech back.’

“As soon as Edison had pointed it out, it seemed so obvious that they did not pause to appreciate what Batchelor would later described as the ‘brilliancy’ of the suggestion. Everyone jumped up to rig a test. John Kruesi, the laboratory’s chief machinist, took command of soldering a needle to the middle of a diaphragm; he then attached the diaphragm to a stand holding one of the wheels used in the automatic telegraph. Batchelor cut some strips of wax paper, and within an hour, they had the gizmo set up on the table, paper inserted on top of the wheel, and the needle adjusted so that it pressed lightly on the paper. Edison sat down, leaned into the mouthpiece, and while Batchelor pulled the paper through, he delivered the stock phrase the lab used to test telephone diaphragms: ‘Mary had a little lamb.’

“When they took a look, the paper strip, as expected, had irregular marks. Batchelor re-inserted the beginning of the strip across the top of the wheel and beneath the needle, then pulled, trying to maintain the same speed as the first time. Out came ‘ary ad ell am.’ ‘It was not fine talking,’ Batchelor recalled, ‘but the shape of it was there.’ The men celebrated with a whoop, shook hands with one another, and worked on. By breakfast the following morning, they had succeeded in getting clear articulation from waxed paper, the first recording medium—in the first midnight recording session.

“The all-nighter at the laboratory must have been a routine occurrence, for the discovery was treated surprisingly casually in the lab’s notebooks. The entries for July 18, 1877 were extensive but focused on the telephone; only at the bottom of one page was (a) brief entry.”

As acclaimed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but, ‘'Thats funny…’” One can almost hear the curious “That’s funny…” echo throughout Edison’s midnight wander. Stross casually observes elsewhere that, “Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone while tinkering with acoustic telegraphy; Thomas Edison invented the phonograph while tinkering with the telephone.”

It’s often that way. When exploring, we have to keep one eye open for breakthroughs we hadn’t been looking for.

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