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1895 Amet Echophone * Historic Phonograph Unlike Any Other * Complete & Working For Sale
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1895 Amet Echophone * Historic Phonograph Unlike Any Other * Complete & Working:
$4250.00
If you\'re an uncompromising collector of antique technology, make sure to check out all my listings after you look at this one. I don\'t think you\'ll find a better, broader or more balanced assortment of technical antiques anywhere -- hundreds of listings each year, almost all of them featuring eye-popping \"gee whiz\" gadgetry in exceptional original condition.And don\'t forget, you can clickthis linkto quickly add and then save me to your favorite seller list and will automatically send you updates when I putsimilar new sales online.
Please note: this phonograph can be delivered, at no charge, to the Midwest Phonograph Expo being held outside Chicago in mid-June. Just indicate at checkout that you want \"local pickup,\" and you won\'t be charged for shipping.
The creation of Waukegan Illinois inventor Edward Amet, the Echophone was an ingenious -- albeit short-lived and impossibly delicate -- device for playing pre-recorded wax cylinders with a hollow, tipped glass rod instead of a sapphire stylus coupled to a diaphragm. Like Emile Berliner, inventor of the disc Gram-O-Phone, Edward Amet believed that a compact, affordably priced device for playing pre-recorded music could and would revolutionize the talking machine industry, extending its reach beyond office dictation settings to homes everywhere. Selling for just $5 when introduced in 1895 (a fraction of the cost of an Edison Phonograph or a Columbia Graphophone), Amet’s Echophone was priced within the reach of every American. Moreover, weighing less than 10 pounds, it was lightweight enough to be carried anywhere, anytime.
But big ideas can be quashed by Big Business and batteries of litigious lawyers, particularly when Big Business feels threatened, and by the end of 1896, Columbia had successfully shut down Amet’s operations. By 1897, the remaining inventory of Mr. Amet’s low-cost alternative to the Edison Phonograph and Columbia Graphophone was being offered at deep discounts to jobbers and mail order houses, who were selling Echophones in bulk for as little as $20 per dozen.
Nobody knows how many Amet Echophones are left today, but the number is small, perhaps just a dozen or so.
Condition of this example is excellent throughout. The original skeletal clockwork (made by Waterbury) is still functional and delightful to watch as it powers the gear train, which drives the mandrel, whose speed is regulated by the simple, two-weight governor — not unlike a Rube Goldberg apparatus. The glass stylus was made by Paul Baker, and it\'s identical to the original stylus that was sold with the phonograph, except that it\'s not broken (I\'m not aware of any original glass stylii that are intact).
Even when it was new, the performance characteristics of an Echophone were limited by the phonograph’s unconventional engineering. Vibrations created by the interaction of the stylus with the hill and dale surface of the cylinder traveled through the long rod to the stanchion, where they entered a small sound chamber and, amplified, traveled out through either a horn or a pair of listening tubes. Stylus tension was regulated by a small spring attached to a piece of string. Not exactly high fidelity, but given its novel design, it works (still) much better than you think it would.
Includes 3 early brown wax cylinders.
I\'m one of \'s best known, most highly regarded sellers of antique phonographs. I\'ve been sellingand shippingthem for more than 25 years. When you purchase an antique phonograph from me, you\'ll receive a phonograph that arrives safely because it\'s been carefully packed (byme, not by some well-intentioned but nonetheless confounded, doe-eyed teenager working at the UPS store who wouldn\'t know a phonograph from a farm tool), and you\'ll receive a phonograph that includes thorough but easy-to-understand set-up and operating instructions, so you won\'t be left scratching your head, trying to figure out how it works. Sure, you can probably get a lower price from Joe and Janet Barn-Find, but when your \"bargain\" arrives broken, and without any hint of how it works or how you might be able to put it back together, you\'ll realize that you really do get exactly what you pay for.
1895 Amet Echophone * Historic Phonograph Unlike Any Other * Complete & Working $4250.00
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