The "Echophone" is a singularly unusual and historic machine from
the earliest years of the phonograph as a home entertainment device. At a time when
the cheapest Columbia Graphophone (the "N") cost $40, and the least expensive
Edison Phonograph (the "Spring Motor") was $75, Amet's Echophone was priced
at a mere $5 - $10. (It would be another two years before Columbia brought such inexpensively-priced
machines (the "B" and "Q") to the mass market.
Amet was
an Illinois inventor who patented a spring motor for phonographs in 1891, and assembled
spring-driven phonographs in 1894 by combining his motors with the topworks from
Edison and Columbia electric machines. Given that he was a pioneer of spring-driven
motors, it seems odd indeed that Amet went to a clockmaker, the Waterbury Clock Co.,
for the motor to power his own phonograph! First marketed in 1896, the earliest Echophones
had string-driven mandrels made of wood, with a deeply cut-out center in an attempt
to evade Edison's tapering mandrel patent. Very soon thereafter Amet switched to mandrels made of black gutta percha, with a smaller indentation. The tonearm is a fragile
glass tube with a stylus formed at the tip, mounted to a crude bellows-type reproducer
made of wood and rubber, and fixed to a wooden post. (Despite its singularly odd
construction, this reproducer works surprisingly well.) It could be fitted with either
a small, very lightweight horn as seen here, or eartubes.
Amet's primitive phonograph very
quickly inspired the wrath of the Columbia Graphophone interests, who sued Amet for
patent violations and won a permanent injunction in late 1896. Amet's enterprise
was driven out of existence, while Columbia took possession of the remaining stocks
of Echophones. Most of these were given away as premiums
to solicit new subscribers to magazines such as Leslies Illustrated News,
while some were sold by a Chicago mail-order dealer (see advertisement below). The
Echophone had only a very brief existence before fading into rapid oblivion, and
few of these very fragile little machines have survived.
This 1897 advertisement shows the Echophone with gutta percha mandrel. The angle of the horn is an artist's interpretation -- while most phonographs had horns that angled upward, the Echophone horn pointed straight. (Although $5 sounds like quite a bargain, in the 1890s that was a substantial sum, equal to over $125 in today's money.)