Toledo Company Sells the “Ediphone”

   [An Ediphone of the 1930s / courtesy of The Henry Ford, Dearborn, MI]

Toledo Company Sells The “Ediphone”                                                        by Alan Borer

Thomas Edison (1847-1931) is a sort of folk hero for the age of technology.  Holder of over 1000 patents, his inventions 

revolutionized the world.  Partially deaf and only a fair 
businessman, Edison can take credit for the electric light, 
the phonograph, the motion picture, the storage battery, the stock 
ticker, and many more.  Overall, Edison is probably best 
remembered as the inventor of “research and development,” the 
practice breaking down bits and pieces of technological wants and 
needs and assigning them to small teams.  He moved inventing 
from the loaner working in his solitary attic, to the modern 
efficient team of technicians.

           Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, south of Sandusky, before moving to Port Huron, Michigan as a boy, later starting his production facility in New Jersey.  But besides being an Ohio native, Edison has a link to Toledo through his invention of a dictating machine and a chain of stores to sell it, one of which was on Jefferson Avenue.  A nationally known brand, the “Ediphone” borrowed technology from his early phonograph patents.  The Toledo area branch still exists, and we will tell some of the story here.

            When Thomas Edison invented recorded sound in 1877, the sound was “captured” by a stylus attached to a vibrating membrane that cut grooves on a cylinder.  Another stylus could reproduce the sound by “reading” the grooves, or reproducing the tracks made by the first stylus.  Edison, who claimed not to trust an invention that worked right the first time, quickly saw that one of the uses of this find would be to ease the work of the office secretary.  No longer would productivity be bound by difficult-to-learn shorthand.  The same cylinders that capture music could capture business dictation.  Replacing tinfoil cylinders with wax, Edison invented the “Ediphone,“ an automatic dictating machine.  Using an Ediphone, the writer of business correspondence could simply speak his correspondence into a horn (later a microphone), and they typist could type the letter later, or even at another location.

            The Ediphone was sold through office supply stores nationwide.  Most major cities supported an Ediphone dealer; many sales locations started selling the Ediphone and added other office supplies later.  Sales of the Ediphone in Toledo were handled by the Roach-Reid Company.  A Cleveland-based company, their Toledo branch was first located in the Produce Exchange Building and later in the Richardson Building on Jefferson Avenue.  Founded in 1906, the company took the names of its founders, J. Herbert Roach and Robert Reid.[i]

            Reid was a guest of Mr. and Mrs. Edison in August of 1918.  Traveling to Edison headquarters in Orange, New Jersey, he attended a gathering of officials of Ediphone distributors.   Held during wartime, there was much singing of patriotic songs.  Reid and others presented Edison with a gold-plated model of an Ediphone.  To mark the phonograph’s 41^st anniversary, visitors could also study Edison’s first tinfoil phonograph.  During presentations, Reid made a speech on “Making Advertising Pay,” recommending that all branches have an advertising budget and pointing out the usefulness of direct mail.[ii]

            Roach-Reid moved to Springfield Township in 1977, and now has a Holland mailing address.  The company seemed destined for dissolution in the mid 1980s, but the Toledo and Akron branches survived to the present.  The days of wax cylinders and the Edison trademark are long past, and the firm now deals with voice recognition and digital communication.  Would Mr. Edison have approved?  My guess is that he would.

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[i] Toledo Blade, September 12, 2005.

[ii] “Edison Men Hold Important Convention,” Office Appliances (September 1918), pp. 29-31.