Yes indeed, Tainter recorded and reproduced laterally, as he realized the potential advantage of this method to guide the needle in the groove. The team at the Volta laboratory called it "zig-zag form". Tainter referred to it in his Home Notes on March 29, 1881 and used it in his early work, but the Volta team "encountered so much difficulty in getting a form of reproducer that would work with the soft wax records without tearing the groove, we used the hill and valley type of record more often that the other." (10/21/1881 Charles Sumner Tainter, Experimental Notebooks maintained at the Volta Laboratory (Home Notes) Book III, October 21st 1881, p. 51)
On September 25th 1881, Tainter deposited a sealed package with documents which mentioned a "wavy or zig-zag line of uniform depth." Shortly afterwards, the method faded into obscurity - until Berliner picked it up. The patent office would have decided the matter just as it did concerning the anticipation by Charles Cros: "... He never followed it up, and it was abandoned and dead and forgotten, and cannot now be galvanized into life and importance it never possessed to defeat the claims of men who had in good faith made the invention, reduced it to practical form, and given the benefit of it to the public.? Stephan In October 1881 Tainter succeeded to get an electrotype of a "zig-zag phonogram" and "obtained intelligible results" by reproducing it with a jet. >http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/images/PDRM1554a.jpg > >They label this as a lateral disc recording, but to me it looks >vertical, just that the sound waves are near the top so they look >lateral. The date 1881, many years before the Berliner disc, has >anyone played this disc? Was this disc known about previous to the >Berliner patent on disc records? You would think that the patent >office would have not accepted the Berliner patents if this was known about?? _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live Messenger: Direkter Zugriff auf Ihre E-Mails! Ohne Neuanmeldung! http://get.live.com/de-de/messenger/overview
