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I thank Madras Book Club and Madras Library Association for the great honour they have done me by inviting me to deliver The Sixth Kumar Memorial Lecture.         Late S N Kumar and his wife late Dr Susheela Kumar in whose memory this lecture has been instituted were great personal friends of me and my wife for nearly three decades. 'An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man', said Emerson in the 19th century. If that be so, Madras Library Association is the lengthened shadow of S N Kumar and his wife Dr Susheela Kumar. I offer my affectionate and reverential salutations to their sacred memory. In particular, myself and my wife, recall several delightful evenings which we had at his residence on Sivaganga Road in Nungambakkam. Poets, writers, novelists, dramatists, bureaucrats and several other distinguished men and women used to come for dinner to their house and the beautiful memories of those sessions will never get erased from our memory.

Edison and early phonograph, 1877

        Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention which first gained him fame was the PHONOGRAPH which he invented in 1877. PHONOGRAPH was the first device for recording and playing back sound. Thus Edison became the first scientist, mechanically, to reproduce speech and song. The phonograph aroused prodigious general interest during that time. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as 'The Wizard of Menlo Park,' New Jersey, where he lived.

1903 advertisement for Edison Records

Edison unveiled his new product 'PHONOGRAPH' to reporters from Scientific American in the spring of 1878, and thereafter coordinated a tour in cities across the country, where either Edison himself or his employees led demonstrations of the phonograph's capabilities in local lecture halls. Edison would later claim that for the first words spoken into the phonograph he utilized 'a little piece of practical poetry: Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.'         Audience members at these assemblies shouted obscenities into the phonograph, hoping to 'trick' it, but it merely played back all the obscenities, recitations, and anything else that was thrown into its little mouthpiece. The American public was astonished and astounded!         The earliest phonograph was something of a crude curiosity, although it was one that fascinated much of the public. Early machines were sold to entrepreneurs who made a living out of travelling around the country giving 'Phonograph Concerts' and demonstrating the device for a fee at fairs. 'Talking dolls' and 'Talking clocks' were manufactured using the early phonograph; these were expensive novelties. Thus Edison inaugurated the era of the newly emerging commercial record industry. His first phonograph recorded on tinfoil cylinders had low sound quality and often destroyed the track during replay so that one could listen to it for only a few times.

        This was one reason that goaded Thomas Edison to devote his whole attention to the foremost task of improving the phonograph and the phonograph cylinder. Edison's moment of great triumph was reached in 1888 when the Edison Company released the first model of the PERFECTED PHONOGRAPH. From this moment, Edison produced wax cylinders 4 inches (10 cm) long, 2 <pi> inches in diameter, playing some 2 minutes of music or entertainment, which became the industry standard. Blank records were an important part of the business early on. Most phonographs had or could be fitted with attachments for the users to make their own recordings. One important early use of PHONOGRAPH was in business for recording dictation. Attachments were added to facilitate starting, stopping, and skipping back the recording for dictation and playback by stenographers. The business phonograph eventually evolved into a separate device from the home entertainment phonograph. The brand name of the Business Phonograph produced by Edison's Company came to be called The Ediphone which later developed into the Dictaphone. Mass producing cylinders manufactured at the Edison recording studio in New Jersey largely ended the local Edison retailers' early practice of producing recordings in small numbers for regional markets, and helped in the concentrated location of the USA recording industry in the New York City - New Jersey area.

Edison Records closed down in 1929. The record plant and many of the employees were transferred to manufacturing radios. The original track masters for the Edison Records back catalogue were purchased by HENRY FORD, and became part of the collection of the Henry Ford Museum. Some of the Edison catalogues are in the public domain which can be visited at the Library of Congress website. Thomas Edison was a freethinker. He said 'I believe that the science of chemistry alone almost proves the existence of an intelligent creator. NATURE is not merciful and loving, but wholly merciless, indifferent.'         Apart from being a great scientist and inventor, Edison also had a great passion for poetry and literature. When he perfected the Phonograph in 1888, he immediately saw the timeless significance of this recording machine. He realized that Walt Whitman, the greatest American poet of his time, was in the last phase of his life. Edison sent his agents to record the voice of Whitman in 1889. Likewise he sent his agents to England in 1889-90 to record the voices of the British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladston (1809 - 1898) and English poets like Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. If only Edison had not recorded those voices, we would not have been in a position to hear them today. When Edison invented the phonograph, there was already a wealth of material for him to record for posterity by ways of immortal poetry, timeless church hymns and others kinds of music rendered by highly versatile performers.

Edison records 'Diamond Disc' label, early 1920s.

        As you listen to the modern versions on today's CD of Edison's historical recordings, we should bear in mind the fact that all that we know of sound storage began with these recordings. To approach this material with a purist's ear for sound quality would be an affront to the sanctity of history. We should regard it as a glorious opportunity to listen to the message rather than the messenger, and the message is clear - humanity triumphs in small stages sometimes, but it is always the beginnings that count the most.

        The search for inspirational prose and poetry is a never-ending quest for Mankind. We will always find new and novel ways to express our deepest longings - for a meaning of life beyond the humdrum of worldly pursuits, and for comfort that goes beyond the material. The immortal recordings of great voices done by Thomas Alva Edison in the late 1880s and in the 1890s remain as authentic and classical witnesses of the timelessness of humanity's eternal spiritual quest transcending place and time. They are indeed man's rational protest against the irrational, man's pitiful protest against the implacable, man's ideal against the world's real, man's word against the cosmic dumbness, man's life against the planetary death, man's revelation of the God within him, man's repartee to the God without him. The great German poet Goethe (1749-1832) said it for all of us when he said: 'Life is always fumbling towards the very thing that the great poets and artists create'.