Gianni Bettini (1860,
Novara
Novara (, Novarese: ) is the capital city of the province of Novara in the Piedmont region in northwest Italy, to the west of Milan. With 101,916 inhabitants (on 1 January 2021), it is the second most populous city in Piedmont after Turin. It is ...
– 27 February 1938,
San Remo) was a gentleman inventor and a pioneer
audiophile
An audiophile is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction. An audiophile seeks to reproduce the sound of a piece of recorded music or a live musical performance, typically inside closed headphones, In-ear monitors, open ...
who invented several
phonograph
A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...
improvements.
He is best known for having made the first (and in some cases only) recordings of the voices of several very famous singers and other celebrities of the 1890s.
Few of these recordings have survived.
Life and career
![Micro-Phonographes Bettini 1901](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Micro-Phonographes_Bettini_1901.jpg)
Bettini was born in
Novara
Novara (, Novarese: ) is the capital city of the province of Novara in the Piedmont region in northwest Italy, to the west of Milan. With 101,916 inhabitants (on 1 January 2021), it is the second most populous city in Piedmont after Turin. It is ...
, Italy. In the 1890s he was a New York socialite, living in the swanky Central Park South neighborhood now in the center of Midtown on the edge of the Theater District. It was there that he kept his
salon
Salon may refer to:
Common meanings
* Beauty salon, a venue for cosmetic treatments
* French term for a drawing room, an architectural space in a home
* Salon (gathering), a meeting for learning or enjoyment
Arts and entertainment
* Salon (P ...
and operated his phonograph laboratory.
Bettini made a number of high-end phonographs that are highly sought-after today. He invented the Micro-Recorder and Micro-Reproducer, recording and playback devices that improved the sound quality of recordings made on brown wax
phonograph cylinder
Phonograph cylinders are the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity (c. 1896–1916), these hollow cylindrical objects have an audio recording engra ...
s, the first commercially practical recording medium. There were many models and refinements but they all centered on the attachment of the
stylus
A stylus (plural styli or styluses) is a writing utensil or a small tool for some other form of marking or shaping, for example, in pottery. It can also be a computer accessory that is used to assist in navigating or providing more precision w ...
to the
diaphragm by a multi-legged unit he called a "spider".
Most of his inventions were marketed to an affluent clientele comprising the first generation of what would now be called
audiophile
An audiophile is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction. An audiophile seeks to reproduce the sound of a piece of recorded music or a live musical performance, typically inside closed headphones, In-ear monitors, open ...
s. One of his later inventions was a universal speed indicator, a device that aided the fine speed adjustment of a phonograph motor (at 120 rpm).
Bettini was personally acquainted with many famous musicians and other public figures and he persuaded some of them to make recordings during visits to his New York
salon
Salon may refer to:
Common meanings
* Beauty salon, a venue for cosmetic treatments
* French term for a drawing room, an architectural space in a home
* Salon (gathering), a meeting for learning or enjoyment
Arts and entertainment
* Salon (P ...
. He recorded
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has p ...
, ex-President
Benjamin Harrison
Benjamin Harrison (August 20, 1833March 13, 1901) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 23rd president of the United States from 1889 to 1893. He was a member of the Harrison family of Virginia–a grandson of the ninth pr ...
and a number of the outstanding singers and instrumentalists of the 1890s, some of whom made no other recordings. Eventually, Bettini began selling copies of some of his cylinders. His catalog of opera recordings was 12 pages long and the cylinders cost as much as US$6 (equivalent to roughly $150 in early 21st century dollars) at a time when typical commercial cylinder records sold for 50 cents. Some of Bettini's most desirable recordings, such as those of the legendary tenor
Jean de Reszke
Jean de Reszke (14 January 18503 April 1925) was a Polish tenor and opera star. Reszke came from a musically inclined family. His mother gave him his first singing lessons and provided a home that was a recognized music centre. His sister Josep ...
, had been made purely as an experiment and a personal favor to the inventor and were not listed, but the catalog intimated that copies of some unlisted items might be obtained by private arrangement.
1898 was established the French ''Société des Micro-Phonographes Bettini'' with a capital of 850 000 francs in Paris, 23, boulevard des Capucines.
Before
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, Bettini brought his collection of master recordings to France. During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, most of them were lost when the warehouse they were stored in (reputedly) was destroyed in an air raid. Due to the combination of that loss, the very small number of copies previously produced, and the fragile and chemically unstable nature of the wax medium, Bettini cylinders are now extremely rare; a few dozen are known to exist. Only the recordings he made of an elderly
Pope Leo XIII
Pope Leo XIII ( it, Leone XIII; born Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci; 2 March 1810 – 20 July 1903) was the head of the Catholic Church from 20 February 1878 to his death in July 1903. Living until the age of 93, he was the second-old ...
just before his death in 1903 (not in 1884, as mistakenly reported in some 2014 news items about papal recordings) were more widely distributed and have consequently survived in multiple copies in both the cylinder and disc formats.
During the years 1901 to 1903, New York
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera (commonly known as the Met) is an American opera company based in New York City, resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, currently situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The company is operat ...
librarian Lionel Mapleson used an Edison Phonograph upgraded with a Bettini Micro-Recorder to record hundreds of brief excerpts of live on-stage performances, known as the
Mapleson Cylinders
The Mapleson Cylinders are a group of about 140 phonograph cylinders recorded live at the Metropolitan Opera House, primarily between 1901 and 1903, by the Met librarian Lionel Mapleson (a nephew of impresario James Henry Mapleson).
The cylinder ...
. Like Bettini, Mapleson captured the voices of singers including those who never made commercial recordings.
Bettini died in 1938 in
San Remo, Italy.
Other inventions
Later in his career Bettini invented an unusual motion picture camera for amateur use which photographed the
frames as an X–Y array on a flat glass plate, but it was not commercialized.
References
External links
*
Bettini Phonograph Reproducers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bettini, Gianni
1860 births
1938 deaths
19th-century Italian inventors
People from Novara
Italian audio engineers
Cylinder record producers