ablishment 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.

In conducting our work we had first to design an experimental apparatus,
then hunt about, often in Philadelphia and New York, for the materials
with which to construct it, which were usually hard to find, and finally
build the models we needed, ourselves.[7]

[Illustration: Figure 3.--PAGE FROM NOTEBOOK of Charles Sumner Tainter,
describing an experiment in sound recording. The Tainter notebooks,
preserved in the U. S. National Museum, describe experiments at the
Volta Laboratory, in the 1880's. The Graphophone patents of 1886, were
the result of this research. (_Smithsonian photo 44312_.)]

The experimental machines built at the Volta Laboratory include both
disc and cylinder types, and an interesting "tape" recorder. The records
used with the machines and now in the collections of the U. S. National
Museum, are believed to be the oldest reproducible records preserved
anywhere in the world. While some are scratched and cracked, others are
still in good condition.

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. Rather than apply for a patent
at that time, however, they deposited the machine in a sealed box at the
Smithsonian, and specified that it was not to be opened without the
consent of two of the three men. In 1937 Tainter (fig. 1) was the only
one still living, so the box was opened with his permission.

For the occasion, the heirs of Alexander Graham Bell gathered in
Washington, but Tainter was too old and too ill to come from San Diego.

The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied
to the Edison phonograph. The following is the text of the recording:
"There are more thi