Summer is a countess fair
Clothed in shimmering sheen,
Rosy footsteps everywhere
Show where she has been.
The glinting sun, the freshening showers,
The bird and honey bee,
The wealth of foliage and flowers
Show her supremacy.
In the mystic hour of night
When the moon is gleaming bright
And little ones in Dreamland play,
The Fairies sing their sweetest lay.
Like a climbing rose they go
To your window, in a row,
And on a nodding rose they sing.
While to and fro they swing and swing.
The Fairies all wanted a graphophone,
So they used for a sounding horn
The bell of a blue morning-glory,
For a needle, a rose's thorn.
Then they put a nasturtium leaf
On an acorn cup for a disk,
And the music that comes from that graphophone--
No wonder they frolic and frisk.
from A Year With the Fairies by Anna M. Scott, 1914
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What was a Graphophone? I had heard of a gramophone and the phonograph; we own an Edison Disc Player and a Victrola from before 1920.I learned that the Edison phonograph (1877) used tin foil as the recording medium, and the graphophone (1880) used wax. In the 1890s the gramophone using hard disk recordings allowed mas production. The company that produced the Graphophone became Columbia Records. The name Graphophone continued into the 1930s.
In 1906 the Victrola with the 'talking horn' changed the industry and recording machines became known as Victrolas.
To learn more about graphophones and the history of recording machines check out these websites:
- http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/phono_technology1.php
- http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/berlhtml/berlgramo.html
- http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/145959/Media-Today-Chapter-10-The-Recording-Industry/#vars!date=1898-05-01_08:17:33!
