This Voicewriter dictation machine, commonly known as a “dictaphone,” was produced throughout the 1950s by Thomas A. Edison, Inc. The 1953 model in the Cooper Hewitt’s collection represents one moment in the long evolution of the dictation machine, which began when Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. The inherent competition to dictation machines, in the form of the pesky human stenographer, complicated by the pressure of growing markets for recording devices of all kinds, led to rapid technological advancements in this arena during the mid-20th century.
Workplace productivity was always the primary concern of dictation machine manufacturers, beginning with Edison and his original phonograph. 1950s advertising campaigns for the Voicewriter make the enticing suggestion that the dictation machine, could be the answer “when you need more minutes in your workday.” The Voicewriter promised office workers the ability to record and convey important information at high speed and low cost.
Message clarity was paramount in order for the dictaphone to support the modern businessperson. One common barrier to clarity was the malleability of the material used to capture the sound waves created by the user. Dents and dings in the substrate, often wax, could reduce the quality of the recording. The Voicewriter stood out for its solution to this problem: the Diamond Disc, a 7-inch red plastic disc that replaced the wax discs and tinfoil sheets with which Edison had been experimenting previously. (One fascinating fact from the dictaphone’s origin story: Edison thought the flexibility of tin foil would allow users to send the “first voice mail” by folding up recordings and sticking them in mailing envelopes.) The rigid plastic of the Diamond Disc could withhold the test of time on a messy desk or in a pocket. Even better, recordings on these discs could be played back on a gramophone as well as on a Voicewriter itself, affording users a much broader group of potential recipients.
A big part of the dictaphone’s appeal was that it could do all of this work without a middleman — or, more likely, without a middlewoman. Dictaphones of this period, like the Voicewriter, entered an office world in which the stenographers they replaced were primarily women. It’s interesting to note that today’s digital versions of the dictation machine (think Siri, Cortana, and Alexa) haven’t strayed too far from this outdated norm.
2 thoughts on “Take a Memo”
Kim Peach on November 23, 2019 at 6:22 pm
We are very pleased to see this posting on the Cooper Hewitt site! It helps us whenever we as archivists come across this format and need to explain the Edison diamond disc to a client or if we familiarizing an entry level archivist with an Edison diamond disc. Into the 1960’s the diamond discs were used to store radio soundbites or to record prior to being transferred to a tape. In a July 2, 2013 post on the Association for Recorded Sound Collections listserv Michael Biel stated that in the 1960’s many businesses and government offices still preferred thse discs to magnetic media because they couldn’t be erased.
Chris Campbell on March 20, 2024 at 8:09 pm
My Dad was a busy physician, practicing in Michigan from the early 1950s. In his first practice they used some sort of wire-recorder cassette system, but after he set out on his own he used these Edison devices to dictate letters to patients, other physicians, insurance companies, and various other correspondents. When the Edisons gave up, he turned to cassette tape systems. When I began practicing law, we had IBM magnetic-belt dictation systems, moving eventually to mini- or micro-cassette systems. Now I’m using a digital system. I learned to dictate from Dad, listening to him. Brief instructions to the typist, then the text. The punctuation is all dictated (comma, semicolon, period, quotes) and unusual words or names are spelled out. I’ve got several of the old Edison units.