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The first audio recording was made in the 1850s when Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville used a bristle attached to a diaphragm to visualize sound waves on a glass plate coated with lampblack. The result satisfied his scientific interest, but there was no way to play it back. Two decades later Thomas Edison realized that the shape of the wave could be embossed as a groove in a substrate using a vibrating diaphragm and stylus. Later, moving a similar needle along the groove would vibrate the diaphragm mechanically and reproduce the sound.
Edison thought the most important use for the phonograph would be business dictation. No one anticipated the absolutely central place that prerecorded music would occupy in 20th century culture. Recording made music continuously available to a mass market. The ability to collect and own music shaped our identity. Music could reach a wider audience, spanning social boundaries. The technology shaped music itself, imposing limits on the length of a popular song and inspiring artists to assemble albums of songs around a single concept.
In 1876, Edison invented a way to store and replay telegraph messages by embossing bumps in a wax-coated paper strip with a metal point moved in and out electrically by the signal. This allowed messages to be recorded and either retransmitted or played back later at a slower speed for transcription. Around the same time, he was working on improvements to the telephone, which he called the "speaking telegraph." The analogy led him to try a similar approach to recording a telephone signal (Bachelor 1896, 586–591). After some success, he said "there's no doubt that I shall be able to store up and reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly reproduced slow or fast by a copyist and written down" (Edison 1877). But he quickly realized the telephone could be taken out of the picture completely. The idea evolved over a period of months until in December of 1877, his machinist built a phonograph from Edison's sketches that embossed the recording on tin foil wrapped around a grooved cylinder.
Edison took the tin foil phonograph on the road, starting with a demonstration at the offices of Scientific American. They were suitably impressed. The invention was widely reported in newspapers and made Edison's reputation, at the age of 30, as The Wizard of Menlo Park.
But tin foil was barely adequate as a recording medium. The quality was poor and tin foil was fragile. In Edison's words:
[The device] weighed about 100 pounds; it cost a mint of money to make; no one but an expert could get anything intelligible back from it; the record made by the little steel point upon a sheet of tin-foil lasted only a few times after it had been put through the Phonograph (The Electrical World 1887, 257–258).
Once people got over the novelty of hearing a human voice coming from a machine, the phonograph fad started to fade.
Edison soon turned his attention to the light bulb, but Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter at Bell's Volta Laboratories stepped in to experiment extensively with alternatives, eventually settling on a type of wax.
Both Bell and Edison thought the phonograph would be used primarily for dictation and attempted unsuccessfully to sell into the office market. But cylinders took off when Louis Glass and William S. Arnold invented a coin-operated music jukebox (Bellis 2019). In the late 1880s, phonographs moved into the home and a recording industry began to emerge.
Cylinders had a successful run of several decades, but they had disadvantages that led ultimately to their replacement by discs. Cylinders were bulky and hard to store. Their geometry made them difficult to mass produce. In the early days, multiple cylinders were produced simply by having the musicians play the same music over and over. Copies could also be created using a pantograph machine, but efficient manufacturing wasn't achieved until Edison introduced a mold-based process in 1902. By then discs had gained a foothold in the market.
Cylinders did have some advantages. The same machine could be used to both play and record, and wax cylinders could be shaved smooth for reuse, both of which were useful in the dictation machines that became common in the early 20th century—in fact, wax cylinders remained in use for dictation until Dictaphone introduced the Dictabelt in the 1940s. For music, a more technical advantage was that the velocity of the needle relative to the record groove—and thus the sound quality—was constant across the entire recording, something not easy to achieve with discs (but see the World Constant Linear Velocity record). Although prized by Edison, this was not enough to slow the adoption of discs. Edison was the last to abandon cylinders in the 1920s.
After Edison turned away from the phonograph to focus on the light bulb and electricity generation, Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter at Bell's Volta Laboratories stepped in to experiment extensively with alternatives to tin foil. They eventually settled on a wax-coated cardboard tube. Edison replaced wax with a metallic soap, although it was referred to as brown wax.
Brown wax cylinders were difficult to mass produce: they had to be inscribed one-by-one through repeated performances or copied mechanically with a pantograph device. Molding was the obvious solution, but brown wax was too soft to survive the process. Celluloid had been adopted by Lioret and Lambert for its hardness and durability, but despite numerous lawsuits Edison was unable to invalidate their patents.
Black wax was developed in the Edison Laboratory by adding carnauba, a hard natural wax, to the brown wax formula (Monroe 2017). Carbon black was added to differentiate it from brown wax. It was hard enough to mold and enabled mass production. The harder wax also allowed finer grooves, leading eventually to the Amberol 4 minute record.
The quest for durability led eventually to celluloid. Celluloid also allowed finer grooves and thus longer recordings. Manufacturers like Lioret and Lambert adopted celluloid early on, but patents forced Edison to wait until 1912. At this point, the transition to disc records was well underway and other manufacturers were no longer making cylinder records.
Cylinders for dictation were made of soft wax (compared to black wax or celluloid), since they were meant to be recorded by the user. Soft wax and a thicker cylinder also allowed the user to shave the cylinder for reuse. Dictation cylinders were longer than standard cylinders (6 vs. 4 in.) and turned more slowly (80 vs. 160 rpm) to provide up to 10 min. of recording time (Richards 2018).
Emile Berliner invented the disc record in 1888, calling the player a gramophone. Discs had several advantages over cylinders. They could be stamped out by machine in quantity and were thus less expensive. The gramophone was a simpler machine than the phonograph. The records were easier to store. The sound quality was initially not as good, but improved over time. Discs replaced cylinders completely by the late 1920's. Durability, duration and quality have improved over the decades since, but the vinyl discs produced today aren't fundamentally different from those first Berliner discs.
As with many of the media in this collection, the early years of disc production were marked by pirating, format wars and patent litigation.
The first records were acoustically recorded by directing sound into a horn attached to a diaphragm that vibrated a needle to cut the groove. This purely mechanical process placed severe limitations on performance, constraining the instruments, number of performers and even the type of singing voice that could be recorded.
By the 1920s, radio, with its microphones, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, raised the public's expectations for audio quality. The first commercially released records made using these new technologies—the so-called "Electrical Recording"—were made in 1922. Electrical recording captured sound using a microphone and amplifier to drive an electromagnetic cutting head. Electric gramophone players were introduced in 1925. Along with the increase in quality, electrical recording vastly expanded the scope of recorded music.
The process of manufacturing records also evolved. For much of the 20th century, the performance was cut directly onto a wax or lacquer master disc. Metal copies were created from the master recording and used to stamp an unlimited number of discs by machine. The ability to sell records in mass quantities helped establish the recording industry.
The invention of magnetic tape recording led to the use of tape masters, which introduced the possibility of editing and multi-track recording. Post-production ultimately became as much of an art as the original performance, resulting in classics like Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The diameter of a record has several implications. Obviously, a larger record can hold more music. But it can also hold the same amount of music recorded at a higher speed, which improves sound quality. Or the extra space can be used to increase the spacing between grooves, which allows a greater dynamic range. A smaller diameter means the record is lighter, less expensive and can potentially be played on a cheaper record player. Small records are easier for children to handle. Very small records have been used in talking dolls and other toys.
The speed at which early records turned wasn't standardized at 78 rpm until the late 1920's. Before then, records might be recorded at anything from 60 to 130 rpm. Wind-up 78 rpm gramophones typically had a speed control that that allowed playing records recorded at 80 rpm. Even when speeds were standardized, there were a number of places in the recording and manufacturing process where differences could creep in, which makes playing early 78s with complete accuracy something of an art. Higher speeds provided better quality, but naturally used more space—hence the 20 inch, 120 rpm Pathe behemoth. Quality was less of an issue for spoken word—audio books were commonly recorded at 16 2⁄3 or even 8 1⁄3 rpm.
The essence of a phonograph or gramophone record is the groove, which in its contour stores an analog of the original sound wave. In a cylinder record, the shape of that wave is represented by a vertical displacement: a variation in the depth of the groove (sometimes referred to as "hill and dale.") Since a vertically cut groove could get quite shallow in places, it was unreliable at guiding the needle across the record during playback and a mechanical feed screw was necessary. When Berliner developed the disc record, he took inspiration from the waves drawn in lampblack by Leon Scott's phonautograph and adopted a lateral or side-to-side displacement. Since the depth was constant, the playback needle could track the groove without the need of an extra mechanism. A deeper groove also allowed the use of a steel needle instead of a jewel stylus. Both lowered the cost of the machine.
Turntables spin with a constant angular velocity, with the result that the linear velocity of the needle relative to the groove is highest at the outer rim, becoming lower towards the center. As a result, recording quality decreases towards the center of the record. Pathé's early records were center start, meaning the needle was placed close to the label to start and traveled to the outer edge. Pathé may have reasoned that the end of a piece tends to be louder and higher pitched, and would be reproduced best on the outside of the record.
Grooves have varied in a number of ways over time, including number: from one to 100 or more; modulation: vertical or lateral; playing direction: inside to outside, outside to inside and locked; density: 70 to 200 or more grooves per inch. Some of these variations were meant to get around patents; others addressed recording quality and duration.
The material used to make a record has to satisfy a number of competing conditions. It has to be hard enough to take an impression of the grooves representing the sound wave, whether through stamping, molding or cutting. It needs to be durable enough to be played repeatedly with minimum loss of fidelity. It should be robust enough to survive handling and a certain amount of inevitable mishandling. It should also be inexpensive, since commercial records are typically mass produced. Berliner's first records were hard rubber, though the industry soon settled on shellac. But shellac, though hard enough to hold the groove, was brittle and abrasive. Vinyl, which replaced shellac with the introduction of the long playing record, was less fragile and, most importantly, could hold a much finer groove, which meant grooves could be closer together and the record could hold more music.
Records for self-recording were a different animal and were made out of everything from zinc or aluminum to lacquer-coated cardboard, steel or even glass.
Most 78 rpm and 33⅓ rpm records use roughly the same size spindle hole, eventually standardized at .286 in. by the RIAA. A few companies adopted other sizes so that once you bought their gramophone, you had to buy their records. Most of these formats didn't last long. The exception is the 7 in., 45 rpm record introduced by RCA in 1949. The 45 had a 1½ in. spindle hole that worked better when playing stacks of records automatically. Not coincidentally, it also meant that Columbia's competing LP records couldn't be played on RCA machines.
A long-playing record (LP) can hold 10 to 12 songs. When LPs were first released the 10 inch, 78 rpm shellac record was standard, holding about three minutes of music on each side. This was fine for popular music; in fact, it contributed to making three minutes or less the standard length of a pop song (an effect reinforced by the later dominance of 7 in. singles and the needs of AM radio). But classical pieces might fill anywhere from four to ten or more 78s and were often released in albums with multiple record sleeves. Fitting more music on a disc became an ongoing challenge for engineers.
There were several variables to play with: diameter, speed and groove density. 78 rpm records were sometimes released on 12 in. discs, increasing their capacity to six minutes. Transcription discs, which held prerecorded programs for radio broadcast, were 16 in. in diameter, as were the Vitaphone discs that provided soundtracks for early 'talkies'. Transcription and Vitaphone discs were also recorded at 33 1⁄3 rpm. The dynamic range of the recording could be lowered to squeeze in more grooves. A better way of achieving the same thing was to use narrower grooves, which required a substrate able to hold thinner grooves. The solution finally released in 1948 by Columbia—a vinyl, 12 in., 33 1⁄3 rpm, “microgroove” LP—used all three strategies.
An LP could hold ten or twelve pop songs. They were often called albums, based on their similarity to the albums that held multiple 78s. (The term is still used to describe collections of songs released on streaming services.) The ability to collect a number of songs on a single record led to the concept album, in which the collection was built around a larger theme. Examples include The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Who's Tommy.
When Columbia introduced the 12 in., 33 ⅓ rpm long-playing record, RCA responded with a 7 in., 45 rpm disc. An LP could hold 22 minutes a side, a whole album's worth of songs or a large part of a classical piece, while RCA's 45 could hold one song per side—about as much music as the standard 10 in. shellac 78. RCA also produced a new record changer, which allowed a stack of songs to be loaded on the record player's spindle and dropped one by one onto the turntable. Record changers had been around since the 1920s, but they tended to wear out the hole in the record. RCA claimed that the larger hole reduced this wear. The choice of the 45 rpm speed meant a slight increase in quality over 33 1/3 rpm.
A single is a record containing one song on each side, released by an artist separately but in conjunction with the LP that contains the songs. Historically, singles have been 45 rpm records. (78 rpm shellac records are not considered singles.) It's partly a marketing tool—people who buy the single and like it may be more willing to spend more to get the whole album. But a single can take on a momentum of its own, hence the term hit single. Most AM radio stations did not play entire albums (FM stations were a different story). Radio played individual songs from multiple artists, punctuated by frequent advertisements. In 1962, if you liked a song you heard on the radio, you could go out and buy it for under a dollar, at a time when albums cost about three dollars (one 1962 dollar equals about ten dollars in 2023).
In the early 1960s, in attempt to increase sales, record companies experimented with putting three or more songs on a 7 in. record. Such records are often collectively called "Little LPs" or "Jukebox EPs", although specific brands existed, like "Compact 6" or "Compact 33". Some were 45 rpm, others were 33⅓ rpm. Although record companies made several attempts, Little LPs never really caught on. 7 inch singles and 12 in. LPs satisfied two different needs: one was cheap and easy to handle, the other held more music. A format in between the two just wasn't distinct enough to be compelling for the mass market. They were successful in jukeboxes for a time in the mid-1960s and again in the early 1970s, but even that didn't last.
EPs never disappeared completely, however. Starting in the 1980s and continuing into the streaming era, they have been used by independent labels to promote new bands before they had enough material for an LP. Established bands use them to release music between full-size albums, which helps maintain market interest. For similar reasons, the concept of an EP as a release of five or so songs continues to exist on streaming services.
Extended play records could also be used to record longer pieces of music, rather than additional songs. A 7 in. 33⅓ rpm record could hold around seven minutes of music, as opposed to five minutes for a 45. That was particularly useful for jazz performances, which could stretch longer than the typical three or four minutes of a pop song.
The first experimental demonstration of the role of binaural hearing in the perception of acoustic "space" occurred in 1881:
Everyone who has been fortunate enough to hear the telephones at the Palais de l'Industrie has remarked that, in listening with both ears at the two telephones, the sound takes a special character of relief and localization which a single receiver cannot produce… This phenomenon is very curious…and has never been applied, we believe, before to produce this remarkable illusion to which may almost be given the name of auditive perspective (Scientific American 1881, 422-423).
The stereoscope had been in common use for 30 years at the time of this description. The analogy between binaural hearing and binocular vision, though imperfect, recognizes that both create a sensation of space. Binaural hearing is also very important in the localization of sound, the lack of which was particularly noticeable once sound was added to movies; it was distracting when a character moved across the screen leaving their voice behind. Allen Blumlein developed stereo recording in the early 1930s specifically to address this problem.
Although home recording on wax cylinders had been possible from the beginning, amateur recording for gramophone discs only became available in 1905 with a home disc recorder offered by the Neophone company. But amateur recording didn't really get started until the early 1920s when zinc recording blanks were introduced. These were recorded acoustically and the quality was poor. In 1926, Speak-O-Phone improved quality with aluminum discs and electrical recording. Finally, in 1934 Presto introduced lacquer-coated discs, which further increased the quality of recordings. A lacquer coating could be applied to a a variety of materials, including aluminum, steel, glass, fiber and cardboard. Lightweight cardboard discs by Wilcox-Gay and others could be recorded and mailed. The Mutoscope company sold automatic recording booths for cardboard Voice-O-Graph records, which, among other things, were used to send personal messages to servicemen in WWII. The ability to send voice recordings through the mail was evidently such a compelling concept that it reappeared several times using different technologies (see, for example, Mail-A-Voice magnetic discs and Mail Call Letterpack tape cartridges). Disc recorders for the home often included a radio to allow recording programs off the air. Magnetic tape recording ultimately supplanted lacquer discs for amateur recording.
Transcription discs, often called electrical transcriptions, were introduced in the mid-1920s to both archive radio shows and to record shows for time-shifting or syndication. The earliest were cut on aluminum discs. Later discs were lacquer or vinyl. A slower speed of 33 1/3 rpm allowed longer programs to be stored, as did a 16 inch diameter.
Inventors and marketers were quick to see the potential of attaching audio to printed media. A small record could simply be glued to cardboard or paper to create a talking postcard or childrens' book. Card stock could also be coated with vinyl or lacquer. The card allowed the recording to be augmented with text or graphics, opening up the possibility of talking baseball cards, etc.
Beyond the standard form-factors and applications, records inspired numerous variations in both appearance and use.
Shellac records were brittle; dropping one reduced it to shards. Flexible records were chiefly promoted for their unbreakability, which Neophone demonstrated by dropping their records off the top of a four-story building. Shellac was also expensive and flexible records were made out of cheaper materials like celluloid, plastic or cardboard. A number of companies released flexible records in the early days of the Great Depression, when many people didn't have the money to buy traditional 78's. Later flexible records like the vinyl Flexi-Disc were developed to allow distribution by mail or in magazines.
The very first commercial discs produced by Emile Berliner in 1889 were nursery rhymes and songs for children. Over time, there were many variations (most of which aren't included in this collection). Sizes ranged from 3 to 10 in. (not including records for talking dolls.) Speeds were 78 rpm to start with, gradually supplanted by 45 rpm in the 1950s.
Edison and others envisioned office dictation as one of the primary uses for the phonograph. Although pre-recorded music turned out to be the killer app for the phonograph, dictation was an important use of grooved media. Wax cyinders were used for many years, having the advantage that they could be "shaved" in a special machine to erase the previous recording. Grooves in thin plastic disks and belts eventually took over. They were lighter, cheaper and in many cases could be mailed in an envelope.
Edison marketed the first talking dolls in 1890, with an embedded phonograph and cylinders similar to the one below for the later Mae Starr doll. They were a commercial failure, in part due to the extremely low quality of the recording, often described today as "creepy". Edison himself admitted "the voices of the little monsters were exceedingly unpleasant." There was no good way at the time to duplicate cylinders, so Edison employed a small army of women in a room full of cubicals to make the recordings. Although Edison's dolls lasted only a few months on the market, several dolls based on cylinders were sold from the 1920s to World War II. Later dolls used disc records, at first fixed inside the doll, but eventually interchangeable.
One problem with disc-based media is their fixed capacity. The same is true for cylinders and belts. Plastic tape could be embossed with a groove, just like a dictation belt, but without a belt's inherently limited length. Plastic tape is also less fragile than discs, making it valuable for portable applications—the Recordgraph tape used to record the D-Day invasion on location is no doubt the most extreme example.
An analog video signal carries far more information than an audio signal. In the late 1920s the inventor of the first mechanical television, John Logie Baird, was barely able to record a low resolution video signal onto a gramophone disc. In the mid-1970s, Telefunken and Teldec released the TeD video system. The disc was spun at 1500 rpm and playback times were limited to 10 minutes for an 8 inch disc. It couldn't compete with VHS and Betamax, which were released around the same time. RCA developed the CED disc, included below, as a lower cost alternative to VHS. Both TeD and CED were read-only media; consumers couldn't record their own videos like they could with magnetic tape formats.
In the early years of personal computing, computer magazines were looking for ways to publish software that didn't require the reader to transcribe code manually. 5¼ in. floppy discs were sometimes packaged as inserts and software was even printed as barcodes. Flexi-discs, flexible vinyl records, addressed a similar problem for music. Audio cassettes were already in use for storing software and the same audio encoding could be stored on a flexi-disc. Interface Age made it work in 1977, calling it a Floppy ROM, and, along with other magazines, occasionally distributed software this way through the mid-1980s. Unfortunately, computers didn't come with interfaces for turntables, so the most straightforward way to load a program was to rerecord it to a cassette tape. This had to be done with care so as not to introduce errors and the format never really caught on.
From the beginning, Edison intended motion pictures to be accompanied by sound in the form of cylinder phonograph records. (A clip and soudtrack made in 1894 by W.K.L. Dickson survives.) For a short period in 1895 Edison marketed a machine for arcades called the Kinetophone, which was basically a Kinetoscope with an unsynchronized soundtrack on a cylinder record. The first projected sound film, developed by Clement-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret and shown in 1900, also used a phonograph cylinder. Gaumont demonstrated a disc-based system in 1902 called the Chronophone that was used in theaters from 1911 to 1917. A number of other inventors and companies experimented with sound-on-disc, but until advent of electronic amplification, gramophones weren't loud enough to fill a theater.
In the 1920s Western Electric developed the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system using Lee de Forest's Audion tube for electronic amplification. Using the Vitaphone system, Warner Brothers released the Vitaphone shorts, a series of short films of musical performances. The soundtracks were recordings of the performance synchronized with the film. There was no spoken dialog. That had to wait for Warner's release of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer in 1927, which led to dramatic changes in the movie business.
The ability of a groove to apply mechanical force perpendicular to a path makes it useful for more than recording sound. In the form of a cam, a groove can be used to program the actions of a machine. Interchangable cams have often been used in home and industrial sewing machines to switch between types of stitches and to embroider lettering.
Deposition of Charles Bachelor.American Graphophone Company vs. Edison Phonograph Works. Mar. 12, 1896. The Thomas A. Edison Papers Digital Edition. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
'Perfectly Reproduced Slow or Fast': A New Take on Edison's First Playback of Sound. The Sound Box 29, no. 1 (March): 3–7.
The New Edison Phonograph. Vol 10, no. 20 (Nov. 12). Original interview with Edison reported in the New York World, Nov. 6, 1887.
History of the Jukebox.ThoughtCo. Updated Feb. 24, 2019.
Broken Cylinders.Library of Congress. May 22, 2017. Video, 55:33.
Recording Speed.The Talking Machine Forum. Mar. 25.
The Telephone at the Paris Opera.Dec. 31, 1881, 422-423.