Pathe Phonograph

My pride and joy is a 1896 Pathe Upright Phonograph. It is the model that originally came with the sapphire ball and had 'higher quality' sound and played records that resemble todays CD patters.. bumps and valleys versus grooves. I have a standard head, diaphragm and needle on it and play regular 78's with it. I traded some antique furniture for the unit, the motor half missing; I ordered a rebuilt motor system on ebay, a lucky find and great price and now it works perfectly. See my facebook video! https://www.facebook.com/douglas.vernon ... =2&theater

Nice machine, sounds good, but I think you might need to adjust the governor. That may eliminate the rattle you hear before you dropped the needle.

Very nice. The record sounds great.

The machine, itself, dates from about the mid-teens to the early/mid 1920s, not 1896. If you spotted an 1896 date, it refers to one of the patents granted to Pathe. Some patent dates appear on products for 20 or 30 years, or more, and in most cases, don't indicate when the product was actually manufactured.

There's not much online about Pathe' or its phonographs, but Wikipedia provides a brief history, including when the first Pathe discs hit the market -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A ... _and_discs

Oftentimes, collectors can find out more about a particular model by culling through old magazine and newspaper ads. For instance -- https://books.google.com/books?id=lahFA ... ls&f=false

One resource worth checking out is "The Talking Machine World," a monthly trade magazine for the phonograph industry, published between 1905 and 1928. The Internet Archive contains several complete volumes, accessible here -- https://archive.org/search.php?query=%2 ... 20world%22 Each volume is searchable, and you can increase the size of the pages, for readability. I did a search for Pathe in the April-June 1921 issue, and dozens of pages were bookmarked.

Joe