Charles Sumner Tainter
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Image:Charles Sumner Tainter.jpg Charles Sumner Tainter (April 25, 1854 - April 20, 1940) was an American engineer and inventor, best known for his collaborations with Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell and his improvements to Thomas Alva Edison's phonograph, resulting in the graphophone, one version of which was the first dictaphone.
Tainter was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he went to public school. His education was modest, he acquired his knowledge mostly through self-education. In 1873, he took a job for a company producing telescopes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which got the contract for the observation of the transit of venus on December 8, 1874, and Tainter was sent with the observation expedition to New Zealand. In 1878 he opened a shop for the production of scientific instruments and a year later, Alexander Bell called him to his Volta Laboratories in Washington, D.C., where Tainter would work for the next seven years.
During this time, he worked with Bell on several inventions, amongst them the phonograph and also the graphophone, a substantial improvement of Edison's earlier phonograph, for which he received several patents. Edison subsequently sued him for patent infringement, but the case was settled by a compromise between the two.
In 1886, he married Lila R. Munro, and over the next years worked in Washington, perfecting his graphophone and founding a company trying to market the graphophone as a dictation machine: the first dictaphone.
His ill health (he was frequently sick with pneumonia) made him and his wife move to San Diego in 1903. After the death of his wife in 1924, he married Laura F. Onderdonk in 1928.
Tainter received several distinguished awards for his graphophone.