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London, 1912. Leaving the premiere of the opera Faust in Covent Garden, the eminent professor of phonetics Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) and Colonel Hugh Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) discuss if language determines the social status of the person, and the professor defends that with his working methods: in six months he can turn a poor, uneducated florist from the city suburbs into a lady of high society. All through language.

This is the plot of the film My Fair Lady, directed by George Cukor in 1964. But how if professor Higgins so sure? What is the infallible method? The method consists of recording the voice of the florist, Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), listening to it and constantly repeating the recorded phrases correctly. In order to record the voice, the teacher has a set of devices: dictaphones and phonographs, for instance.

 

And what are these gadgets shown in George Cukor's movie? According to the dictionaries, a phonograph is a device that mechanically reproduces sounds recorded on a cylinder, and a dictaphone is a device for recording and reproducing dictations and conversations.

The phonograph was developed by Thomas Alva Edison in 1877 and the first patent was issued on February 19, 1878. The first devices recorded the sound in cylinders of wax, lasted about two minutes and with few reproductions the cylinder is damaged and had to be replaced with a new one. When at the beginning of the century the wax was replaced by a harder plastic, which allowed recording up to 4 minutes and, therefore, the cylinders could be used more times, this lowered the price of the cylinders and the invention became somewhat more popular, but the price of 35 cents on the dollar was still expensive for the population, which had an average salary of 9 dollars per month for 52 hours per week.

The phonograph, along with the gramophone, were the most common tools for reproducing sound from the late 19th century until the 1950s, when they were replaced by magnetic tape.

In 1978, the Museu de la Música de Barcelona purchased from Francisco Arellano Elías an important collection of about 180 instruments, mainly phonographs, gramophones and dictaphones… as well as more than 500 phonograph cylinders, 1000 gramophone records, posters, paintings and all kinds of accessories for this type of pieces. We do not know much about this collector, who ran an antique shop in Barcelona, and we only keep the purchase documents for his collection.

We have also seen that in 1989 Francisco Arellano Elías made an important donation to the Museo del Pueblo Español, which belongs to the Museo Nacional de Antropología, of a whole collection of domestic appliances, from cheap kitchens, first models of gas, first electric toasters, electric coffee makers or the first electric stoves. If it is the same donor, we would be dealing with a collector in love with the technological inventions of the early twentieth century and the great changes in design and technology.

One of the tasks of the collections department of a museum is to review, catalog, document and restore the objects that are part of the museum's heritage. In this sense, last November some photographic sessions began with the museum's phonograph collection to improve their quality. In total, in eight sessions photographs were taken of more than a hundred instruments of this type. This entailed making a prior review of all the devices that we had both in the permanent exhibition and, above all, in the reserves.

This review was helpful in order to carry out a cleaning intervention and to consolidate material, as well as improving the documentation by expanding information on each piece. This was the case for Amberola, a model of Edison brand phonograph after a fire in its factories, which consisted of a simpler model, both box and mechanism, for 4-minute cylinders, and of which three different models were manufactured, Amberola 30, 45 and 50, the number of which told the retailer the starting price in dollars.

We have also been able to document the phonograph with the Grenet electric battery, the first system to provide energy to rotate the cylinder, created in 1889 and obsolete when the system of winding a clockwork mechanism was imposed.

When reviewing the pieces and all their accessories, we managed to assign some unpaired bells or supports during some of the transfers that the pieces have undergone since they entered the museum in 1978. In December Jordi Puig, the photographer, sent us more than 1,400 images that have gone through the process of renaming, cataloging, description and link to the file of each piece, to make them available to the public through the catalog of instruments. All these images are already part of a digital collection of photographs, videos, sound recordings and museum documents with more than 66,000 records.