The Speech of Monkeys by Richard Lynch Garner

However, what is most interesting about this phonograph story is that the printed media, an old media, was responsible for the rise and fall of Garner’s research. However, Garner wanted Edison to add some improvements like two mandrels, one dedicated to reproducing sounds and another one to record sounds, and the addition of a telephone wire to increase the distance between “the recording phonograph and the recorded utterance.” Although these improvements to the phonograph were discussed they were never implemented, but these discussions show a clear intention to combine new medias to help the development of scientific research. The phonograph technology allowed not only to record the simian’s tongue but also to replay it to the simians to study their reactions and to replay the records in a lower pace to analyze the sounds more closely. In the summer of 1891, Garner’s usage of the phonograph gained Edison’s attention, and he invited Garner to work in some improvements to the phonograph that could help him in his expedition to Africa. Garner’s designs for a double-spindle phonograph. He presented his findings to Frank Baker, the director of the zoo, and by 1891 he had the Smithsonian’s support. But, by the end of 1890, Garner started using it to record the speech of the monkeys in the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park. The phonograph was also used to record other languages to help people to learn other languages. In his experiments, he recorded and preserved the songs, folk-lore, rituals and speech of the Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine.

By 1890, the anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes started using the phonograph to study the languages of American Indians. The usage of the phonograph as a scientific tool was not Garner’s invention.

Garner and the Rise of the Edison Phonograph in Evolutionary Philology”, Gregory Radick studies this particular episode in the history of the phonograph and its relationship with the scientific community and the dominant media during the late nineteenth century. Garner was going on a mission to Africa to, with the aid of the phonograph, record simians and study their language, since, as he wrote to Phonogram in 1892: “If, as scientists have asserted, we are depended from the Simian race, and the conductors of this mission succeed in establishing communication with it and discover a genuine vocabulary, we shall then owe to the phonograph the obligation of teaching us our ‘Mother Tongue.'” In his article “R.L. Source: Apes and Monkeys by Richard Lynch Garnerīy 1892, Richard Lynch Garner, an amateur philologist, proposed an application for the phonograph that, if it had been successful, could have changed the history of the phonograph and its usages as well as the history of evolutionary philology.

The Speech of Monkeys by Richard Lynch Garner