The World’s Oldest Recording: Frank Lambert's Amazing Time Machine – Part 2
By Aaron Cramer with Allen Koenigsberg

At first, I thought the heavy, oddlooking machine incorporated an obvious improvement over the Edison tin foil phonograph, that is, the foil could be wrapped around a removable (pre-grooved) metal sleeve. But when I brought the machine to Peter Dilg at the Baldwin Antique Center, he immediately guessed that the grooves (80 per inch) were not a guide for the foil at all, but themselves contained a recording, directly cut into the lead! Peter then used the steel recording point to make a new groove on a separate brown wag cylinder. When he had fitted a reproducing stylus to that track, he knew he had one that would fit the lead sleeve. He soon devised a delicately-adjusted electrical pick-up, and for the first time in over 110 years, as we rhythmically cranked away, these unexpected words eerily came forth:

One o'clock, Two o'clock, Three o'clock, Four o'clock, Five o'clock, Six o'clock, Seven o'clock, Eight o'clock, Nine o'clock, Eleven o'clock, Twelve o'clock.

("Ten o'clock" was omitted, perhaps because Lambert was still a relatively new immigrant).

There are other words too, including even a track going in the opposite direction, but they cannot be clearly understood at the present time. Some of the grooves appear to be damaged, or were perhaps over-cut, as this is the first phonograph equipped with a shaving device to erase a previous recording. The recorder used a tin diaphragm .008" thick and 2-3/8" in diameter and the reproducer diaphragm would be the same, presumably. The recording stylus is a finely ground steel cutting tool, with a draft at the edge to allow removal of the lead swarf. The top enclosures seem to be gutta percha and are threaded into brass mounting rings.

The machine base itself is solid 6" by 11" milled steel, and the length of the shaft and winding wheel is 15”; the overall height is about 7". A quick release lever allows the main threaded shaft to be repositioned immediately after recording. The total weight is about 22-1/2 pounds.

I invited Allen Koenigsberg to look over the machine and together we tried to get into the mind of Frank Lambert. Allen agreed that the device was very early (1879-1880), probably made not much after the first tinfoil phonograph. It made no sense for Lambert to use such heavily machined materials after the introduction of wax cylinders later in the decade. And why did Lambert continue his testing beyond a traditional "one, two, three"? It could only have been done for the full sound track necessary for a talking clock! This supposition was somewhat confirmed when Allen compiled a detailed list of Lambert's 60 patents. There, at the beginning of his inventive career (in the late 1870's), were two for clock devices.

Another line of research recently opened up. It is relatively easy to consult published patents, but what happens to the ones that were never granted in the first place? I found out over the summer when my wife Thea and I visited the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland. The ungranted applications are generally not saved, but since they were accompanied by a down payment of $15, Patent Registers were maintained, listing serial number, name of inventor, date, title of invention, etc. In the time available, we were only able to go through the year 1880 (the names are not fully indexed alphabetically for that period). But there, two intriguing possibilities emerged, two Lambert applications that were never granted: the first was for the vaguely-worded "Clocks" (filed on June 17th) and the second was for "Screw Cutting Lathes" (filed on Aug. 2nd)! Could it be that these cryptic references hid what Lambert was really doing?

With the purchase of the machine, I was also able to obtain many of Lambert's personal effects, including some original patents, business letters from his patent attorneys (including pioneer Edith Griswold), die stocks, scrapbooks and photos. Amongst nearly 2000 newspaper clippings of poems and poetic sayings, I found a curious one from about 1896. It was a two-inch announcement about a talking clock, but apparently that of the Swiss inventor Casimir Sivan, who employed vulcanite discs to announce the time. Did this stir his memories?

At this point, Allen recalled that Edison himself, in the optimistic days shortly after the invention of the phonograph, predicted that his creation would be used in talking clocks and said so in a published article in the May-June 1878 issue of the North American Review. As a matter of fact, he even arranged a contract to produce one (on Jan. 5, 1878) with Daniel Somers and Henry Davies. That must have been the link, for it was to the same Henry J. Davies that Frank Lambert assigned one half of his first granted patent!

Edison had planned a copper-plate, lever-wound spring phonograph which was successfully built in Ansonia and described in a letter to Alfred Mayer on Feb. 11, 1878. Would it be impossible that either Davies or Eugène Pastre (a friend and co-patentee of Lambert also) asked Lambert to make a cylinder model as well? Both Davies and Pastre worked for the Ansonia Clock Co.

And now, as we go to press, we have located a little known court case through the kindness of researcher Ray Wile. It was filed against the Edison Phonograph Works by the American Graphophone Co. in 1892 and contained some startling testimony from several experts in the field (U.S. Circuit Court, Dist. of NJ, In Equity, No. 3500). Summoned to the Edison table in early April 1896 as a defense against Bell and Tainter's patent 341,214 was none other than the President of the Thomson Water Meter Co., one Frank Lambert. In answer to several detailed questions, he testified under oath that he had indeed built a recording machine "around 1879", and that he had actually engraved the sound vibrations on a permanent metal sleeve. All of our guesses and suppositions had miraculously been proved true!

It is now clearer than ever that when Bell and Tainter embarked on their phonographic endeavors at the Volta Laboratory in Washington, DC, they may have had another motive for delaying their patent applications and sealing their original work in a metal chest (Oct. 20, 1881) deposited with the Confidential Archives of the Smithsonian Institution. The Volta group may have feared Edison's legal wrath over the meaning and use of the word "indenting" as they converted an Edison/Bergmann tinfoil phonograph to a wax covered Graphophone; or they may have even have doubted their contractual rights to a non-telephonic invention; but how could they deal with a lead-sleeve phonograph which engraved sound vertically, and was built prior to their own? Although Lambert said he could not locate his original machine in 1896 and had destroyed his only duplicate, Columbia found it in their best interests to settle and cross-license Edison in December 1896.

There might be other candidates for older "recordings", like Leon Scott's fabled phonautographic tracings of Abraham Lincoln at the White House (1863) or the still-extant foil strip of the aged voice of scientist Joseph Henry (1878).

But primitive sheets of sound like these have never been restored. Until that day arrives, the rhythmic words of the modest French immigrant who settled in Brooklyn constitutes the oldest playable record in the world.

Frank Lambert died in New York at the age of 86 (from pneumonia and uremia) on June 21, 1937, and was buried in a solid copper casket at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. He lies there in good company today, among the likes of Samuel Morse (telegraph), Elias Howe (sewing machine), Walter Hunt (safety pin) and Louis C. Tiffany (stained glass). But there is a final mystery, even in death, surrounding him. Although Green Wood has verified that Frank Lambert is indeed buried in Lot #28721 and his first wife and three of his children have their names clearly engraved on the handsome marble tombstone, his own name is not to be found at all. An omen, no doubt, of the obscurity into which he would soon unjustly fall.

Our thanks to Ruth Edge at EMI Archives, Peter Dilg, Allen Koenigsberg, Thea Cramer (above and beyond the call of duty), Daniel Marty, Jean-Paul Agnard, the National Archives (James Cassedy, Greg Bradsher, Robert Morris, John Silardo), Ray Wile, the Musee de Lyon and Theresa La Vianca at Green-Wood Cemetery.

Illustration: At first thought to be an interchangeable sleeve for tinfoil sheets, the 2-5/8” engraved lead cylinder was found to contain the world’s oldest playable record. The recording head is visible at left front, the reproducer at the rear.

Article and image courtesy of Antique Phonograph Monthly, Vol.X No.3.

ARTICLE UPDATE: In a recent email to Collector Cafe, Aaron Cramer wrote: "I would like to mention that the Lambert Machine with the recording is on long term loan to the National Watch & Clock Collectors Museum in Columbia, PA. They feel it is the first attempt to make a Talking Clock using the Human Voice. Also in 1992 it was put in the Gunniness Book of Records & The Encyclopedia of Recorded sound in the United States as "The World's Oldest Playable Recording."