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CD Life and Times



One of the great treasures from my childhood is an antique Edison phonograph
player. (You know the kind; the records look like toilet paper tubes...)
Anyway, my mom brought this thing home from an estate sale with a whole
cardboard box full of records, and we set the thing up in our living room
and played these old funky tunes from the past.  Some were spoken "comedy"
recordings that I have recently learned to be sensitive about (How come
Scotsmen seem to be the butt of all those turn of the century jokes on
frugality?  I am truly offended.  My heritage is under attack.  Someone
recognize my victimhood here...)

Anyway, what I remember is that the mechanism of the stylus operated on a
worm gear, forcing it across the grooves in the cylinder at a set speed, and
as a result, about half of the records skipped uncontrolably.  I just could
never figure out what was wrong, but even though I could not "read the data"
(listen to the music) I never threw away those old cylinders either.  Then,
one Christmas about five years ago, my brother in law bought me a book on
Edison players.  I found my model and read the specs and, lo and behold, I
discovered the purpose of that little knob down on the end of that worm
gear.  By pulling it out, it reduces the speed by half, allowing the stylus
to drag across the grooves of those skipping cylinders at the right speed
and releasing their data.

The point of this long and convoluted story is this:  With this new
technology of cds, Mp3, DVD, BVDs, and everything else, we must not loose
sight of the necessity of maintaining working models of the hardware to read
them.  Museums and archives must cooperate by collecting and keeping these
gizmos in working condition.  Assuming for a moment that a CD can last a
hundred years, somebody had better keep an Edison reader around to listen to
it  (and an owner's manual that tells how to plug it in...)

Kim (technologically challenged) Scott

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