Dictation machine
Encyclopedia
Tape recorder
An audio tape recorder, tape deck, reel-to-reel tape deck, cassette deck or tape machine is an audio storage device that records and plays back sounds, including articulated voices, usually using magnetic tape, either wound on a reel or in a cassette, for storage...
s.
The name "Dictaphone
Dictaphone
Dictaphone was an American company, a producer of dictation machines—sound recording devices most commonly used to record speech for later playback or to be typed into print. The name "Dictaphone" is a trademark, but in some places it has also become a common way to refer to all such devices, and...
" is a trademark
Trademark
A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...
of the company of the same name, but has also become a common term for all dictation machines, as a genericized trademark
Genericized trademark
A genericized trademark is a trademark or brand name that has become the colloquial or generic description for, or synonymous with, a general class of product or service, rather than as an indicator of source or affiliation as intended by the trademark's holder...
.
History
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone....
and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax.
Thomas A. Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877, but the fame bestowed on him for this invention — sometimes called his most original — was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted and squeaky, and good for only a few playbacks. Although Edison had hit upon the secret of sound recording, immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system.
By 1881 the Volta associates had succeeded in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used. The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent, and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin-foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus.
Among the later improvements by the Volta Associates, the Graphophone used a cutting stylus to create lateral zig-zag grooves of uniform depth into the wax-coated cardboard cylinders, rather than the up-and-down vertically-cut grooves of Edison's
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...
then-contemporary phonograph machine designs.
Notably, Bell and Tainter developed wax-coated cardboard cylinders for their record cylinders
Phonograph cylinder
Phonograph cylinders were the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity , these cylinder shaped objects had an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which could be reproduced when the cylinder was...
, instead of Edison's cast iron cylinder, covered with a removable film of tinfoil (the actual recording medium, which was prone to damage during installation or removal. Tainter received a separate patent for a tube assembly machine to automatically produce the coiled cardboard tubes, which served as the foundation for the wax cylinder records.
Besides being far easier to handle, the wax recording medium also allowed for lengthier recordings and created superior playback quality. Additionally the Graphophones initially deployed foot treadles to rotate the recordings, then wind-up clockwork drive mechanisms, and finally migrated to electric motors, instead of the manual crank that was used on Edison's phonograph. The numerous improvements allowed for a sound quality that was significantly better than Edison's machine.
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...
invented the phonograph
Phonograph
The phonograph record player, or gramophone is a device introduced in 1877 that has had continued common use for reproducing sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds...
, the first device for recording sound, in 1877, he thought that the main use for the new device would be for recording speech in business settings. (Given the low audio fidelity
Fidelity
"Fidelity" is the quality of being faithful or loyal. Its original meaning regarded duty to a lord or a king, in a broader sense than the related concept of fealty. Both derive from the Latin word fidēlis, meaning "faithful or loyal"....
of earliest versions of the phonograph, recording music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
may not have seemed to be a major application.) Some early phonographs were indeed used this way, but this did not become common until the mass production of reusable wax
Wax
thumb|right|[[Cetyl palmitate]], a typical wax ester.Wax refers to a class of chemical compounds that are plastic near ambient temperatures. Characteristically, they melt above 45 °C to give a low viscosity liquid. Waxes are insoluble in water but soluble in organic, nonpolar solvents...
cylinders in the late 1880s. The differentiation of office dictation devices from other early phonographs, which commonly had attachments for making one's own recordings, was gradual. The machine marketed by the Edison Records
Edison Records
Edison Records was one of the earliest record labels which pioneered recorded sound and was an important player in the early recording industry.- Early phonographs before commercial mass produced records :...
company was trademarked as the "Ediphone".
Following the invention of the audion tube
Audion tube
The Audion is an electronic amplifying vacuum tube invented by Lee De Forest in 1906. It was the forerunner of the triode, in which the current from the filament to the plate was controlled by a third element, the grid...
in 1906, electric microphone
Microphone
A microphone is an acoustic-to-electric transducer or sensor that converts sound into an electrical signal. In 1877, Emile Berliner invented the first microphone used as a telephone voice transmitter...
s gradually replaced the purely acoustical recording methods of earlier dictaphones by the late 1930s. In 1945, the SoundScriber
SoundScriber
SoundScriber Disc was a dictation format introduced in 1945 by The SoundScriber Corp. . It recorded sound by "pressing" grooves into soft vinyl discs. Competing products were the Gray Audograph and Dictaphone DictaBelt....
and Gray Audograph
Gray Audograph
The Gray Audograph was a dictation format introduced in 1945. It recorded sound by pressing grooves into soft vinyl discs , like the competing, but incompatible, SoundScriber...
, which cut grooves into a plastic disc, was introduced, and two years later Dictaphone replaced wax cylinders with their Dictabelt
Dictabelt
The Dictabelt or Memobelt was a form of recording medium introduced by the American Dictaphone company in 1947. It used a type of "Write Once - Read Many" medium consisting of a thin, plastic belt 3.5" wide that was placed on a cylinder and spun like a tank tread. The needle would then move slowly...
technology, which cut a mechanical groove into a plastic belt instead of into a wax cylinder. This was later replaced by magnetic tape
Magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders...
recording. While reel-to-reel tape was used for dictation, the inconvenience of threading tape spools led to development of more convenient formats, notably the Compact Cassette
Compact Cassette
The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. It was designed originally for dictation, but improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant the Stereo 8-track cartridge and reel-to-reel...
, Mini-Cassette, and Microcassette
Microcassette
A Microcassette is an audio storage medium introduced by Olympus in 1969. It uses the same width of magnetic tape as the Compact Cassette but in a much smaller container. By using thinner tape and half or a quarter the tape speed, microcassettes can offer comparable recording time to the compact...
.
Digital dictation
Digital dictation
Digital dictation is a method of recording and editing the spoken word in real-time for transcription and maximum intelligibility in a digital audio format...
became possible in the 1990s, as falling computer memory
Computer memory
In computing, memory refers to the physical devices used to store programs or data on a temporary or permanent basis for use in a computer or other digital electronic device. The term primary memory is used for the information in physical systems which are fast In computing, memory refers to the...
prices made possible pocket-sized digital voice recorders that stored sound on computer memory chips without moving parts. Many early 21st-century digital camera
Digital camera
A digital camera is a camera that takes video or still photographs, or both, digitally by recording images via an electronic image sensor. It is the main device used in the field of digital photography...
s and smartphone
Smartphone
A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant and a mobile phone or camera...
s have this capability built in. In the 1990s, improvements in voice recognition technology began to allow computers to transcribe
Transcription (linguistics)
Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...
recorded audio dictation into text
Text file
A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists within a computer file system...
form, a task that previously required human secretaries or transcribers. the technology is not robust enough to replace human transcription in most cases.
Despite the advances in technology, analog media are still widely used in dictation recording for their flexibility, permanence, and robustness.
Common dictation formats
- Phonograph cylinderPhonograph cylinderPhonograph cylinders were the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity , these cylinder shaped objects had an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which could be reproduced when the cylinder was...
(1890s) - Gray AudographGray AudographThe Gray Audograph was a dictation format introduced in 1945. It recorded sound by pressing grooves into soft vinyl discs , like the competing, but incompatible, SoundScriber...
(1945) - SoundScriberSoundScriberSoundScriber Disc was a dictation format introduced in 1945 by The SoundScriber Corp. . It recorded sound by "pressing" grooves into soft vinyl discs. Competing products were the Gray Audograph and Dictaphone DictaBelt....
(1945) - DictabeltDictabeltThe Dictabelt or Memobelt was a form of recording medium introduced by the American Dictaphone company in 1947. It used a type of "Write Once - Read Many" medium consisting of a thin, plastic belt 3.5" wide that was placed on a cylinder and spun like a tank tread. The needle would then move slowly...
(1947) - Compact CassetteCompact CassetteThe Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. It was designed originally for dictation, but improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant the Stereo 8-track cartridge and reel-to-reel...
(1963) - Mini-Cassette (1967)
- MicrocassetteMicrocassetteA Microcassette is an audio storage medium introduced by Olympus in 1969. It uses the same width of magnetic tape as the Compact Cassette but in a much smaller container. By using thinner tape and half or a quarter the tape speed, microcassettes can offer comparable recording time to the compact...
(1969) - Digital dictationDigital dictationDigital dictation is a method of recording and editing the spoken word in real-time for transcription and maximum intelligibility in a digital audio format...
(1990s)