. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution . he idea went; but he can not be said to have dis-closed the means of carrying his ideas into practice. Mr. Berlineronly became aware of this gentlemans invention three months afterhe had filed his own application for a patent. In the ElectricalWorld of November 12, 1887, in which he first made public his inven-tion of the gramophone, he writes of Mr. Cross as follows: Although he had virtually abandoned his invention, the fact remains that toMr. Charles Cross belongs the honor of having first suggested the idea of anda fe
. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution . he idea went; but he can not be said to have dis-closed the means of carrying his ideas into practice. Mr. Berlineronly became aware of this gentlemans invention three months afterhe had filed his own application for a patent. In the ElectricalWorld of November 12, 1887, in which he first made public his inven-tion of the gramophone, he writes of Mr. Cross as follows: Although he had virtually abandoned his invention, the fact remains that toMr. Charles Cross belongs the honor of having first suggested the idea of anda feasible plan for mechanically reproducing speech once uttered. The reasons which led Berliner to adopt a different system of re-cording and reproducing sound from that emploj^ed by Edison andthe Volta Association are clearly set out in the introduction to hisfirst patent specification, Xo. 15232, of 1887, where he says: By the ordinary method of recoiding spoken words or other sounds for re-production, it is attempted to cause a stylus attached to a vibratory diaphragm. 212 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1908. to iudent a traveling sheet of tinfoil, or other like substance, to a depth varyingin accordance with the amplitudes of the sound waves to be recorded. This at-tempt is necessarily more or less ineffective, for the reason that the force ofa diaphragm vibrating under the impact of sound waves is very weak, and thatin the act of overcoming the resistance of the tinfoil, or other material, thevibrations of the diaphragm are not only weakened, but are also , while the record contains as many undulations as the sound which pro-duced it, and in the same order of succession, the character of the recorded un-dulations Is more or less different from those of the sounds uttered against thediaphragm. There is, then, a true record of the pitch, but a distorted recordof the quality of the sounds obtained. With a view of overcoming this defect, it has been attempted
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