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This recent article in the NY Times about Thomas Edison is a fascinating look at the beginnings of the recorded music industry. Entitled, "Edison the Inventor, Edison the Showman," Randall Stross adapts his new book, "The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World," to this article:

Thomas Alva Edison is the patron saint of electric light, electric power and music-on-demand, the grandfather of the Wired World, great-grandfather of iPod Nation. He was the person who flipped the switch. Before Edison, darkness. After Edison, media-saturated modernity.

A bit grandiose? Perhaps, but it was certainly true that his outsized ego affected what was recorded and how the movie and music industries got off the ground.

Edison had retained the patent rights and business stakes in the phonograph, so when the business came into its own, he approved the construction of expanded manufacturing facilities adjacent to his laboratory to handle the orders that poured in. This was followed by still more growth, and more building: an entire block adjacent to the laboratory was filled with five-story hulks. By 1907, as the company erected its 16th building, Edison boasted of "the largest talking machine factory in the world."

In fact, he was a brilliant marketeer of the music he recorded:

Edison and his copywriters courted the urban middle class with advertising that made prospective customers feel as entitled to enjoy the pleasures of recorded music as anyone. "When the king of England wants to see a show, they bring the show to the castle and he hears it alone in his private theater." So said an advertisement in 1906 for the Edison phonograph. It continued: "If you are a king, why don't you exercise your kingly privilege and have a show of your own in your own house."

Edison essentially created the music industry, both with his technology and his business acumen. And although his large ego prevented him from seeing that a rival (Victor) had a better grasp of where musical tastes were going in the first decade of last century, "he wrote a correspondent that he had had to take on the responsibilities of musical director for his company because the incumbent had made what Edison deemed to be awful decisions, permitting players to play out of tune and, most egregiously, tolerating a defective flute that 'on high notes gives a piercing abnormal sound like machinery that wants oiling.'"

At the same time, he was an equal-opportunity musical editor:

His dislike of various musical genres and artists was strong and encompassed almost everything. Popular music - "these miserable dance and ragtime selections" - had no chance of receiving his blessing. Jazz was for "the nuts;" one performance reminded him of "the dying moan of dead animals." But he was no elitist. He also dismissed the members of the Metropolitan Opera House as lacking tune. Sergei Rachmaninoff was just "a pounder."

Amazing stuff!

And then there's this:

Edison's partial loss of hearing prevented him from listening to music in the same way as those with unimpaired hearing. A little item that appeared in a Schenectady newspaper in 1913 related the story that Edison supposedly told a friend about how he usually listened to recordings by placing one ear directly against the phonograph's cabinet. But if he detected a sound too faint to hear in this fashion, Edison said, "I bite my teeth in the wood good and hard and then I get it good and strong." The story would be confirmed decades later in his daughter Madeleine's recollections of growing up. One day she came into the sitting room in which someone was playing the piano and a guest, Maria Montessori, was in tears, watching Edison listen the only way that he could, teeth biting the piano. "She thought it was pathetic," Madeleine said. "I guess it was."

Read the entire article for other gems like these!

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