Phonograph

The invention that brought MUSIC to our ears

early record players, known as phonographs, were able to record and play sound back. thomas edison struck the f rst note.

Flat discs soon became the most popular listening format.

Sound signals

Thomas Edison, the famous American inventor, made an exciting discovery while working on a recorder for telegraph signals in 1877. He realized that the indentations made by the signals produced sound when a needle ran back over them. So he went to work using cylinders wrapped in tinfoil, a metal disc, a handle, and a needle, and invented the phonograph, the first machine to record sound.

The horn is used to both record sound, and amplify sound when played back.

Rotating cylinder plays sounds when the handle is turned.

Did you know? Thomas Edison thought that teaching would be a more popular use of his invention than listening to music.

Spinning discs

Edison’s foil-wrapped cylinders were absolutely amazing, but they were a bit bulky, and could be played only a few times before decaying. In 1887, German-American inventor Emil Berliner invented a machine that traced sound grooves onto a flat disc instead of a cylinder. Many copies of the discs could be made—they were the first records.

It paved the way for...

Vinyl records became very popular in the middle of the 20th century and are still made today.

The first compact audio cassettes were released in 1962, originally intended for dictation machines.

HOW When Edison spoke into the horn, the pressure of his IT WO R KS voice caused the needle to scratch indentations into the tinfoil-coated cylinder as it rotated. When the needle was moved over the indentations it had scratched into the foil, it played back the sound of Edison’s voice through the horn, which magnified the sound. Needle

Rotation of cylinder The needle moved up and down in the dents to reproduce the sound.

Into the groove As time passed, further improvements were made to both the records and the players. The grooves on records became thinner, so more sound could fit on each disc. Loudspeakers replaced the horns of the early phonographs to amplify the sound. With How it changed the worl d It’s hard to imagine life without a soundtrack of your favorite songs, but before the phonograph, you had to make your own music or go to concerts to hear them. Recorded sound meant that at last everyone could listen to the world’s greatest music in their homes. these improvements, records were finally sounding great, and people started collecting music from their favorite musicians.

Incredible Edison

By the way... I was very hard of hearing, which helped me concentrate—maybe that’s why I never invented a hearing aid! Although he ended up with more than a thousand inventions to his name, Edison considered the phonograph to be his favorite invention. He set up his own record label, edison records, to publish new recordings—first on cylinders, and later on discs. He continually improved the phonograph right up until his death in 1931.

CompaCt disCs were invented in 1965 but didn’t become popular until they were mass-produCed in the 1980s. mp3 players were invented in the late 1990s, making it possible to take your entire

musiC ColleCtion with you wherever you go.