.Friday, July 18, 2008 ' 3:50 AM Y
Early attempts to design a consumer sound or music playing gadget began in 1877 when Thomas Edison invented his tin-foil phonograph. The word "phonograph" was Edison's trade name for his device, which played recorded sounds from round cylinders. The sound quality on the phonograph was bad and each recording lasted for one only play. Edison's phonograph was followed by Alexander Graham Bell's graphophone. The graphophone used wax cylinders which could be played many times, however, each cylinder had to be recorded separately making the mass reproduction of the same music or sounds impossible with the graphophone.On November 8 1887, Emile Berliner, a German immigrant working in Washington D.C.,
patented a successful system of sound recording. Berliner was the first inventor to stop recording on cylinders and start recording on flat disks or records.
The first records were made of glass, later zinc, and eventually plastic. A spiral groove with sound information was etched into the flat record. The record was rotated on the gramophone. The "arm" of the gramophone held a needle that read the grooves in the record by vibration and transmitting the information to the gramophone speaker.(See larger view of
gramophone)
Berliner's disks (records) were the first sound recordings that could be mass-produced by creating master recordings from which molds were made. From each mold, hundreds of disks were pressed.
