Phonograph | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877 opened up a world of recorded sound and created one of the great entertainment industries. The phonograph made it possible to reproduce sounds at will, and the machine eventually emerged as a critical step in the mechanization of leisure time. The first talking machine, the phonograph was an entertainment technology encased in a piece offurniture; its acceptance into millions of homes made it an important forerunner for the radio and television sets that became the center of home life entertainment in the twentieth century.

The technology of sound recording was conceived as an accessory to the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell's invention was aimed primarily at businessmen, and it followed that once a message was transmitted there should be a device to make a permanent record of it. Thomas Edison was heavily involved in improving all aspects of Bell's telephone and he stumbled upon the principles of acoustic sound recording in the fall of 1877. He found that the sound vibrations of his voice were strong enough to power a stylus to cut a signal into a revolving sheet of tinfoil. Even his own laboratory staff were surprised to hear a faint reproduction of his voice when the tinfoil was rerun under the stylus.

Edison was only one of many inventors and scientists experimenting in telephony and in the years after his famous invention of 1877 several important improvements were made to his phonograph—wax cylinders were used instead of sheets of tinfoil, spring motors replaced hand powered cranks, and a disc format for the recording medium was developed. The latter was the work of the inventor Emile Berliner, who called his machine the Gramophone. Both phonographs and gramophones were based on the same technology; only the format of the record was different. Two large business organizations were founded on each format and the competition between cylinder and disc lasted until the late 1920s when Edison phased out the production of cylinders. Despite the demise of the cylinder-playing phonograph Americans continued to call their talking machines "phonographs" while Europeans called theirs "gramophones," regardless of make or format.

Acoustic sound recording technology was as yet too primitive to be adopted by businessmen; subsequently, the only commercial applications were found in entertainment. First people paid to hear their own voices and then they paid to listen to music. The demand for prerecorded cylinders and discs was so great that the manufacturers of talking machines moved into studio recording and the mass production of records. They recorded all types of popular music—patriotic band music, sentimental Irish and German ballads for immigrants, bawdy songs and the ethnic humor of vaudeville, and selections from opera and classical music.

As mass production techniques were applied to the manufacture of talking machines, more customers had to be found to maintain sales levels, so more types of music were recorded. By 1914 the manufacturers of talking machines had recorded the music of every immigrant group in the United States—including those from Asia—and had delved into the nostalgic antebellum past to recycle the music of the minstrel show, the "coon" songs that made fun of the slaves.

It was not until the 1920s that the manufacturers discovered two groups of customers who would sustain their business for much of the century: African Americans and rural folk. In 1920 the Okeh record company discovered the enormous untapped market of black urban consumers with the phenomenal sales of "Crazy Blues," sung by Mamie Smith. This began the craze for blues and jazz records in the 1920s that prompted the author F. Scott Fitzgerald to label the decade "the jazz age." In 1927 the RCA company sent Ralph Peer to the South to record local music. He recruited (among others) Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family to sing for the recording machine and enshrined them as the pioneers of country music. During the Great Depression, when sales of records dried up, the demand for "hick discs" sold in general stores or by mail order was an important source of income for the record companies.

The introduction of radio and electronic recording in the 1920s dramatically extended the capabilities of sound recording and reproduction but did little to change the role of the phonograph in popular culture. Nearly every household in the United States had a talking machine and a collection of records in the living room as a source of entertainment. Radio initially cut into sales of phonographs but over time the two learned to coexist; radio depended on recorded sound as a primary source of programming and the phonograph companies found that radio was a good way to introduce new recordings to a national audience. The industry of recorded sound survived the Great Depression and by the 1940s recordings of swing music were selling in the millions of units.

Recorded sound defined popular music in the twentieth century and the record companies determined how it was categorized. Rock 'n' roll bridged the gap between country music for the white audience and rhythm and blues for the black in the late 1950s. The musical tastes of the baby boom generation born after the end of World War II drove the industry of recorded sound in the 1960s and 1970s, as rock 'n' roll on vinyl 45-rpm discs was gradually supplanted by art rock and psychedelic rock recorded on long playing discs.

Although generations of users had learned how to place a needle on a revolving disc and ignore the scratches and pops as it travelled along the groove, the phonograph still suffered from short playing times and lack of a recording capability. Magnetic tape recording proved to be the solution to these problems, and the introduction of the first tape cassettes in the 1960s signalled the beginning of decline for the phonograph. During the 1970s sales of the Philips compact audio cassette equalled those of phonograph records and a tape recorder became an essential part of the home entertainment center. A new form of sound recording based on digital encoding was introduced in the 1980s. The compact disc offered virtually noiseless recordings, ease of operation, and much longer recording times. Slowly, phonograph records disappeared from retail stores and the end was predicted for a technology that was now over a hundred years old. Yet many music lovers refused to throw away their phonographs, and the manufacture of needles and record players continued into the l990s.

Eisenberg, Evan. Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture. London, Picador, 1987.

Frow, George, and Albert Self. The Edison Cylinder Phonograph. Sevenoaks, Kent, United Kingdom, Frow, 1978.

Koenigsberg, Allan. The Patent History of the Phonograph. Brooklyn, APM Press, 1990.

Millard, Andre. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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