Essay about Invention of the Phonograph

The turntable, also called a record player, was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, who called it a phonograph. Later versions were called gramophones and Victrolas. By the late 1940s, high-fidelity and stereophonic sound were introduced, along with the vinyl LP. In the 1950s, because of these improvements, consumption of record players and records had sharply increased.

A very popular consumer item was the phonograph. It was first invented in 1877 but it was so expensive it took a while for the homes in america to get ahold of it , by the time of the 1920’s 7 million homes had their hands on one but they were still pretty expensive. The phonograph was a music recorder and to the people of america it was important because that's where most of their music came from either that other radio. It was referred to by many names like “talking machine” or “music machines” or its proper word “phonograph”. The most popular phonograph was called the “victor victrola”. Its inventors were Thomas Edison, Emile Berliner,Eldridge R. Johnson. The newer version of the phonograph that was produced in the 1920’s didn’t have

The development of the phonograph is similar to the development of the Audio Spotlight. The first rudimentary machine was for recording and playing back sounds. The way it all started out was using paper strips to make a record of telegraph messages. By attaching a needle to the back of the diaphragm and mounting it above rollers for the paper strips, then putting sound to the into the mouthpiece causes the diaphragm to move. After, this causes the needle to inscribe squiggled indentations into the strips. Last, the indentations would move the attached diaphragm, which should reproduce the original sound.

The history of music players dates back to November 21, 1877 when Thomas Alva Edison invented a device for recording sounds and then playing it back called the Gramophone. It was patented on February 19, 1878. The Gramophone looked like a cylinder that was smaller at one end and bigger at the other. Even today, at the annual Grammy Awards the awards that are given out are miniature versions of Edison’s invention.

As Americans watched silent movies, sound-based entertainment also grew. New forms of music such as ragtime and the cakewalk were all the rage, and some people, such as Rudolph Wulitzer, knew how to take advantage of America's new taste for music. Wulitzer was a German immigrant who found moderate success in importing musical instruments from his home country. In the 1890's, however, he changed his focus to musical machines. He invented the first coin-operated electric organ, and soon after, self-playing harps and pianos. He sold them to hotels and restaurants that could not afford live musicians and he made quite a lot of money. When he turned his company over to his sons, they developed a pipe organ that filled movie theaters with sound. They would later develop the jukebox and make a fortune in the 1930's, after the Gilded Age was over. But it was during this era that the Wurlitzer Company got its start.5

After reading "History Of The Cylinder Phonograph",by , it becomes obvious that the phonograph was made,but didn't work well,so it had to be refined,patented then marketed then sold and still in use today. I Know it had to be refined because in the article it states''Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape.'' "He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly moving paraffin paper.The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper.Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it." Then after he refined it, he filed for a patent.The patent on the phonograph was issued on February 19,1877.

Emile Berliner invented the gramophone. “However, the biggest innovation came in 1894 from the mind of United States inventor Emile Berliner. He devised a way for creation of flat shaped discs, and he renamed his graphophone design that utilized this disc as gramophone.” (Sound Recording History). In Cold Sassy Tree, the record player had a huge impact on Grandpa Blakeslee’s relationship with Miss Love.

The audion helped AT&T set up coast-to-coast phone service, and it was also used in everything from radios to televisions to the first computers. (A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries, 1999). By the time he died he had over 300 patents, but few of them ever had much success. In fact, De Forest seemed to have a long streak of failures. He was regularly involved in patent lawsuits (indeed, he spent his fortune on legal bills). He went through four marriages, had a number of failed companies, was defrauded by his business partners, and was even once indicted (but later acquitted) for mail fraud. (Kraeuter, 79).

Edison is widely considered to be the first person to record sound but a man in France actually beat him to

In 1872 he began experimenting with different metals to find one that could vibrate in response to sound, send a signal over an electrified wire and then reproduced the sound. Soon he found that his lack of knowledge in electricity would prevent him from creating his telephone. Upon the suggestion of Joseph Henry, a colleague of his, Mr. Bell decided to educate himself on the concept. After digging into the subject, according to the Patent Office, Mr. Bell knew more about electricity than all the other inventors put together.

He knew that if you could represent the binary 0 and 1 with dark and light, then a device could be produced that is able to read sounds or any other information without wearing it out and if he could make the binary compact enough he could store a bunch on a small piece of film. Bettelle let him pursue his project and in 1970, after years of work, he succeeded in inventing the first digital-to-optical recording and playback system, the CD. A CD is a simple round piece of plastic about 4/100ths of an inch thick, and 12 centimeters in diameter used for electronic recording, storing, and playback.

Thomas Edison was the first to record sound while he was experimenting with his new telegraphing device ("Earliest Recordings Ever Made."). He did this by accidently running an indented tin foil under the telegraph's stylus ("Earliest Recordings Ever Made."). By the end of the year, he had successfully

After he and Edison parted ways, Tesla founded Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing in 1886. In spite of his many ideas for improvements for preexisting technologies and original inventions, his investors were not interested in funding him. Tesla soon ran out of money for his company and was forced to close down and he lost what few patents he had.

Knowing this, Edison set out to make a motion picture machine. Edison saw no commercial value in it, which is somewhat ironic, but still decided to make it anyway. In an interview in 1887 he said, "It is possible to devise an instrument, which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." Edison assigned the aforementioned, William Kennedy Dickson to pursue the research and development of his idea. Dickson discovered is that they machine must use light. That may seem very obvious but light was fairly new and somebody had to come up with the idea it must be incorporated in Edison's idea. For film, Dickson used a 1 and ½ inch wide strip of celluloid. Celluloid was brittle and broke easily but it continued to be used. George Eastman discovered a better substance for film. It was called Eastman film. Eastman had developed the film for Edison's already invented kinetograph. So using that name, Dickson developed a machine he called the

phonograph in 1877, people have felt the need to create and record music. People have different