Figure 1.—Charles Sumner Tainter (1854-1940) from a photograph taken in San Diego, California, 1919. (Smithsonian photo 42729-A.)
Meanwhile Bell, always a scientist and experimenter at heart, after his invention of the telephone in 1876 was looking for new worlds to conquer. If we accept Tainter's version of the story, it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879. Hubbard was then president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was having trouble with its finances because people did not like to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for an unskilled person to operate.
In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the machine, and it was agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, and this resulted in the selenium-cell Photophone, patented in 1881. Both the Hubbards and the Bells decided to move to the Capital. While Bell took his bride to Europe for an extended honeymoon, his associate Charles Sumner Tainter, a young instrument maker, was sent on to Washington from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to start the laboratory.[3] Bell's cousin, Chichester Bell, who had been teaching college chemistry in London, agreed to come as the third associate. During his stay in Europe Bell received the 50,000-franc ($10,000) Volta prize, and it was with this money that the Washington project, the Volta Laboratory Association,[4] was financed.
Figure 2.—Photographing Sound in 1884. A rare photograph taken at Volta Laboratory, Washington, D. C., by J. Harris Rogers, a friend of Bell and Tainter (Smithsonian photo 44312-E).
A description of the procedure used is found on page 67, of Tainter's unpublished autobiography (see [footnote 1]). There, Tainter quotes Chichester Bell as follows:
"A jet of bichromate of potash solution, vibrated by the voice, was directed against a glass plate immediately in front of a slit, on which light was concentrated by means of a lens. The jet was so arranged that the light on its way to the slit had to pass through the nappe and as the thickness of this was constantly changing, the illumination of the slit was also varied. By means of a lens ... an image of this slit was thrown upon a rotating gelatine-bromide plate, on which accordingly a record of the voice vibrations was obtained."
Tainter's story, in his autobiography, of the establishment of the laboratory, shows its comparative simplicity:
I therefore wound up my business affairs in Cambridge, packed up all of my tools and machines, and ... went to Washington, and after much search, rented a vacant house on L Street, between 13th and 14th Streets, and fitted it up for our purpose.[5]... The Smithsonian Institution sent us over a mail sack of scientific books from the library of the Institution, to consult, and primed with all we could learn ... we went to work.[6]... We were like the explorers in an entirely unknown land, where one has to select the path that seems to be most likely to get you to your destination, with no knowledge of what is ahead.