Volta Laboratory and Bureau - Laboratory Projects

Laboratory Projects

The Volta Laboratory Association, or Volta Associates, was created by formal legal agreement on October 8, 1881 (backdated to May 1 of the same year), constituting the Volta Laboratory Association to be the owner of its patents. It was dissolved in 1886 when its sound recording intellectual property assets were transferred into the Volta Graphophone Company. The association was composed of Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Sumner Tainter and Bell's cousin, renowned British chemist Dr. Chichester Bell.

During the 1880s the Volta Associates worked on various projects, at times either individually or collectively. Originally, work at the laboratory was to focus on telephone applications, but then shifted to phonographic research at the prompting of Tainter. The laboratory's projects and achievements included (partial list):

• the 'intermittent-beam sounder' – used in spectral analysis and in the generation of pure tones (1880);

• the Photophone – an optical, wireless telephone, the precursor to fiber-optic communications (February 1880);

• experiments in magnetic recording – attempts at recording sounds permanently fixed onto electroplated records (spring 1881);

• an artificial respirator that Bell termed a "vacuum jacket", created after one of his premature sons died due to his immature lungs (1881);

• the 'spectrophone' – a derivative of the Photophone, used for spectral analysis by means of sound (April 1881);
• an improved induction balance – an audible metal detector created in a bid to save President James A. Garfield's life (July 1881);
• a 'speed governor' for record players (fall 1882);
• the 'air-jet record stylus', an electric-pneumatic phonograph stylus designed to reduce background noise while playing a record, resulting in U.S. Patent # 341,212 granted on May 4, 1886 (known as the air-jet recorder) (November 1885);
• an audiometer – used in both telecommunications and to assist in studies of deafness,

...as well as several other important, and commercially decisive improvements to the phonograph, during which they created the tradename for one of their products – the Graphophone (a playful transposition of phonograph).