I was thinking today that I like my job. First I like music, and then I like challenges. Loudspeakers make music and are challenging. One particularly enjoyable thing about them is that they span a wide area of physics, from electricity, magnetism to electronics, materials, acoustics and mechanics. With that I came to wonder who the first man or woman was was to piece this all together and figure out how to produce sound from electricity. The short answer: I had no clue.
I decided to go and find the quick answer for my own curiosity and found out that this was an incredibly difficult question to ask.
The first people to try to build loudspeakers had a distinct chicken-egg type problem: There was absolutely nothing that could be played on them and therefore the microphone had to be invented first which in turn needed a loudspeaker to be of any use.
The main motivation to invent something like that at all was not the reproduction of music but rather human speech and with that a race ensued to invent the first telephone. Determining who actually made that race got surprisingly messy keeping the US courts busy for 23 years between 1878 and 1901 in what became known as the telephone cases. This series of law-suits was intended by the plaintiffs to overthrow the patent awarded to Alexander Graham Bell in 1874 for having devised the telephone. It seems that Bell had stolen ideas from so many people who in turn had stolen from each other, that the courts at some point simply gave up. The supreme court came within one vote of overthrowing the patent, and we can definitely argue that the true inventor of the telephone might at this point be undeterminable. Case in point, the patent examiner, Zenas Fisk Wilber, who awarded the disputed patent later stated in an affidavit that he was an alcoholic who was much in debt to Bell's lawyer, Marcellus Bailey, with whom he had served in the Civil War. No further questions, your witness...
Amongst the contenders in the telephone cases was the first person who actually tried to build a telephone. A German self taught scientist by the name of Johann Philipp Reis. One of the distinct features of this phone was that any sound recorded and transmitted by it would be converted into a rather unintelligible and unpleasant squeak. Mr. Reis was a rather sensitive man and not robust against rejection and was fiercely challenging Bell in court. There he was joined by other early visionaries like Emile Berliner, a man who later went on to invent the first disc gramophone and David Edward Hughes who had built the first functioning microphone. Reis made his case by presenting his machine and a contemporary accounts for his experience as follows.
"In the course of ... lawsuit, a Reis machine was brought into court, and created much amusement. It was able to squeak, but not to speak. Experts and professors wrestled with it in vain. It refused to transmit one intelligible sentence. ‘It can speak, but it won't,’
So Reis definitely invented the first loud "squeaker", but does that make him the inventor of the first loudspeaker?
Another fun contender for this merit, was Italian Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci who´s primary line of work was shocking people using high voltage to bother them out of their rheumatism and other ailments. At some point while applying 114V on some poor bugger, he was so bothered by the obnoxious screaming that he would remove himself from the treatment site to the upper stories of his house while applying the electroshocks from a distance. And then the remarkable thing happened: The screams were coming through the electrical wires! When attaching a piece of paper to the wires he thought he heard an unarticulated human voice, presumably begging him to stop unintelligibly.
While the underlying physical principle of this early electrostat are unclear to me and perhaps most others, the US congress as late as 2002 issued a resolution in which it "Expresses ... that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.
With all this mess surrounding the invention of the telephone, it is time to look at the loudspeaker alone. Among the first people to think about this was a french man called Charles Bourseul, in 1854 long before Alexander Graham Bell actually invented the first functional telephone, he wrote:
“Suppose that a man speaks near a movable disc sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the voice; that this disc alternately makes and breaks the currents from a battery: you may have at a distance another disc which will simultaneously execute the same vibrations.... It is certain that, in a more or less distant future, speech will be transmitted by electricity. I have made experiments in this direction; they are delicate and demand time and patience, but the approximations obtained promise a favorable result.”
Now looking back, I think we can clearly see the problem with the idea of a microphone being some sort of vibrating circuit breaker, and I suspect that Monsieur Bourseul was not entirely clear about the wave nature of sound. But it does strike me odd that the most modern amplifiers today work on a very similar principle of switching on and off for preset periods of time to generate an average signal. They do that 300´000 times a second though at much higher frequency than the wave form they are trying to reproduce.
But thinking about something isn´t exactly inventing it, as otherwise My son can claim to have invented time travel or tele-transportation which he seems to think about a lot.
So who did invent the loudspeaker? Meet Charles Grafton Page from Massachusetts. As early as 1837 he had discovered that a needle placed in the hollow of a coil or bobbin of insulated wire, would emit an audible 'tick' at each interruption of a current, flowing in the coil, and if these separate ticks followed each other fast enough, by a rapid interruption of the current, they would run together into a continuous hum, to which he gave the name "galvanic music".
Charles Grafton Page was a gifted man and went on to develop a deep understanding of electro magnetism. I don´t think he looked at his galvanic music device as much more than a curiosity and did not seem to have envisioned that it would one day be in the homes of many. But I do credit him for being the inventor of the loudspeaker and am very happy that those things work as well as they do.
Page was also one of the few people credited by Graham Bell to have contributed to the invention telephone, so he may just be legitimate.
