That dog Nipper

In 1887, Thomas Alva Edison shocked the world when he introduced the phonograph, a machine which recorded and played back sound. But a dog, named Nipper, outdid Edison’s feat, when the 80-percent bull terrier made the records globally popular as an entertainment medium.

Edison’s tin foil phonograph has two diaphragm-and-needle units; one for saving the sound, and the other, for playing it back. Sound vibrations moved the mouthpiece’s needle to cause indentions onto the cylinder in straight up (or hill and dale) groove pattern, while the other needle grazed the groove. Sound is played back by the friction of the needle grazing the indentions.

Neat? Not quite.

The phonograph reproduced sound badly, and the playback only lasted for several minutes. Alexander Graham Bell’s improvements on Edison’s machine called graphophone used wax cylinders instead of tin foil. The graphophone could play sounds many times over, but since each cylinder had to be recorded separately, it was impossible to mass produce the same music or sounds.

Enter the gramophone. Emile Berliner, an immigrant from Germany, introduced a recording system completely independent from wax and tinfoil. He launched his invention only months after the birth of the phonograph. Berliner started recording on flat disks or records which were initially made of glass, then zinc, resin and finally plastic or vinyl.

The gramophone works using the same principle as that of Edison’s and Graham Bell’s: vibrating sounds which caused indentions or grooves into the flat record. Playback was made when the record rotated on the machine. A needle or a stylus attached to the gramophone’s arm read the sound information etched on the flat disk then transmitted this to the gramophone speaker.

The reason Berliner’s invention was different from the phonograph and the graphophone was that a master mold can be made from which different copies of the same sounds could be pressed for mass production.

Now back to the dog named Nipper. He was called Nipper because of his penchant for nipping behind visitors’ legs. He was adopted by Francis Barraud, a painter, when his first master Mark Barraud (Francis’ brother) died in poverty in Bristol, England, at about the same year the phonograph was born. Nipper was moved to Liverpool where he eventually discovered the phonograph lying on top of Francis’ living room’s table. Francis was so amused at the sight of Nipper desperately trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. Three years after Nipper died in 1885, Francis painted the same scene, which he unsuccessfully tried to sell to several art patrons. The painting was registered on Feb. 11, 1899, as "Dog Looking at and Listening to a Phonograph." Francis later changed the painting’s name to "His Master’s Voice." That probably did the trick.

Berliner later founded The Gramophone Company whose main goal was to mass- produce records and the gramophone that played them. Berliner, the inventor, proved to be an astute merchandiser as well. Two things he did which propelled his business to unimaginable stature was sign on Enrico Caruso and Dame Nellie Melba as his exclusive artists, and when he used His Master’s Voice as his company’s official trademark. (The Gramophone Company, however, requested Francis to alter the painting so that Nipper would be shown with the gramophone instead of the phonograph). Of the two marketing moves, many believed that Nipper was the principal reason the gramophone enjoyed the highest recall among record consumers around the world and what ignited the music explosion of the ‘60s.

Despite advances in digital know-how, vinyl still rules over CDs because with vinyl, what we hear is the exact reproduction of sound. Music is reproduced the way it is supposed to be – pure, unadulterated, and faithful to the original. The grooves you see on the disk are the exact replica of the sound waves copied by forcing vibrating air to cause indentions on the disk. CDs, on the other hand, are bound by digital rules. Engineers decided to delete sounds below 20 hertz and above 20 kilohertz because humans can’t hear them anyway. Such a move is debatable (more on this in my next column), and many of these engineers now doubt if they made the right move.

Today, Nipper and the recording format he represents are alive and reign supreme in the music rooms of audiophiles worldwide. His Master’s Voice has done much more than be one of the 10 most famous brands of the 20th century. Nipper embodies a technology that should be dead, but still flourishes to this day.

* * *

For comments or questions, e-mail me at vphl@hotmail.com.