On September 17, 1915, in Montclair, New Jersey, the contralto Christine Miller, the flautist Harold Lyman, and the violinist Arthur Walsh took the stage to perform as they normally would. The concert was held not too far geographically in place or in time from where Frank Sinatra would be born on December 12, 1915, in Hoboken, New Jersey. The concert began in many ways the same as all concerts do, but this concert had another performer who was not listed on the program: an Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph. As the story goes, the musicians would stand directly next to the Edison Diamond Disc, and periodically, they would stop singing or playing to reveal that the Edison Diamond Disc was producing a sound that was nearly identical to the artists. The audience was left stunned as they realized that they had been duped by the Edison Diamond Disc. The thin line between man and machine had just been seriously blurred.
This was the first of Thomas Edison’s numerous “tone tests.” These tone tests lasted for about a decade, running in small and midsize concert venues from 1915 until 1925. Thousands of tone tests were performed each year with a troupe of 25 different artists performing, or rather “not performing,” next to an Edison Diamond Disc. The goal of Edison’s tone tests was to illustrate the idea that the reproductions made by Edison phonographs were perfect reproductions of real-life human speech or real-life music.
Most of the early tone tests began just as they did that autumn night in New Jersey, but as word began to spread about them, the overall flair of the affair began to grow. When tone tests were performed in larger theatres, the performers would, just as they had in Montclair, sing or perform along with the Edison Diamond Disc and occasionally drop out from time to time so that the audience could hear the recreation made by the phonograph. As a jaw-dropping conclusion to some of the larger shows, Edison would have the house lights of the theater dropped while the artist was still performing. While the audience was plunged into darkness, the performer would silently walk off stage. After a minute or so, the lights would be resurrected to reveal the phonograph, all by its lonesome, playing on the stage, leaving the audience in awe because they thought they had been listening to the performer’s real voice.
As alluded to, the general public began to grow increasingly interested in these tone tests, and many folks wanted to attend one of these performances to test the Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph out for themselves. In Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, nearly 1,400 people came to hear Christine Miller, one of the original tone test performers, sing with herself. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1,800 people sat while an additional 200 people stood in the Cambria Theatre. One of the local newspapers, the Johnstown Democrat, reported that the standing-room-only crowd was amazed, stating, “but so splendid were many of the records which were played that spontaneous applause followed their rendition.”
One of the largest and by far the most audacious of Edison’s tone tests was performed in the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York, New York. Around 3:30 PM on March 10, 1920, the soprano Anna Case took the stage alongside an Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph. 59 years later, she recalled the Carnegie Hall performance stating:
“I remember I stood right beside the machine. The audience was there, and there was nobody on stage with me. The machine played and I sang with it. Of course, if I had sung loud, it would have been louder than the machine, but I gave my voice the same quality as the machine so they couldn’t tell. And sometimes I would stop singing and let the machine play, and I’d come in again. Well, it seemed to make a tremendous success.”
A success it certainly was. Her performance made headlines all across the country, and more and more people clamored not only for the tone tests, but the Edison Diamond Disc Phonographs themselves.
However, the days of the tone tests were numbered. Just a year after the Carnegie Hall performance, thousands of scheduled tone tests were being canceled across the country left and right. By 1925, a new competitor was driving the phonograph industry into the ground: the radio. Also by 1925, Edison’s major competitors in the recording industry, Columbia and Victor, had been accruing a close association with major celebrities and in turn, celebrity name recognition had been a more valuable selling point to consumers than Edison’s focus on high-fidelity recordings. The Edison Company officially flipped the switch of the Edison tone tests to “off” in 1926.
Although the last tone tests were officially conducted almost exactly a century ago, you can conduct your own tone test with an Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph from 1916 at the Thomas A. Edison Birthplace Museum in Milan, Ohio! Prior to each tour, members of the amazing and knowledgeable staff walk visitors through the history of Edison’s phonograph, allowing visitors to look at and listen to history. The Thomas A. Edison Birthplace Museum has a wide collection of records to listen to, including everything from national anthems to Hawaiian music! Is the Edison Diamond Disc as good as it sounds? I guess you’ll have to hear it to believe it for yourself.
Sources Used and Encouraged for Further Reading
Carnegie Hall. “Anna Case's March 10th, 1920 Performance Program.” Carnegie Hall Performance History Search. Accessed December 16, 2024. https://www.carnegiehall.org/About/History/Performance-History-Search?q=Anna%20Case&dex=prod_PHS&event=5509
Cornell, Bryan, and Jan McKee. 2015. “Is It Live or Is It Edison?” Library of Congress. https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2015/05/is-it-live-or-is-it-edison/
Harvith, John, and Susan E. Harvith, eds. 1987. Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph: A Century in Retrospect. Bloomsbury Academic.
Milner, Greg. 2010. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. N.p.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Petrusich, Amanda. 2014. Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records. Scribner.
The Sun and New York Herald. 1920. “Sings With Her Record: Miss Anna Case Gives Best Of Phonograph Re-Creations.” March 11, 1920, 9. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030273/1920-03-11/ed-1/seq-9/
Thompson, Emily. 1995. “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925.” The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (Spring): 131-171. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/742520.pdf
Dillon Liskai, a native of Clyde, Ohio, is currently a junior at Bowling Green State University. He is pursuing a degree in Adolescent to Young Adult (AYA) Integrated Social Studies Education with a specialization in History.
For the past three years, Dillon has worked as a tour guide at the Thomas A. Edison Birthplace Museum. When not at school or the museum, he enjoys cheering on the Bowling Green Falcons, spending time with friends and family, and exploring local history.
Have a question for Dillon? Reach out via email at dliskai@tomedison.org!
Comments