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Phonograph History

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Mankind has created countless remarkable inventions throughout their time here on earth. The time at which all these inventions were created has everything to do with the technologies and ideas available to the inventors at the time. For example, the record player has been altered and improved constantly since its invention in 1877.

Music transcends cultures, nations, and generations within the human culture and its importance has withstood the test of time. Recording music and storing it began as tribal songs passed down by elders, evolving into written lyrics, then to electronically and magnetically stored sound. Today, we all buy and listen to music digitally online. With the importance of music in culture around the world, in this discussion board I will examine the development of technologies the record player uses to record and store sounds of the ages. …show more content…

The phonograph is a compilation of numerous different technologies that were all put together and refined to create the world's first "talking machine." Edison took experience and data from his work with telephony and telegraphy in the telegraph (an invention that had already been around for 40 years) and applied it to the idea of the phonograph. The telegraph uses a series of impressions in a spool of paper to transmit messages, Edison implemented this idea into his machine with the grooved indentations in the tracks of the record. The electronic process to etch the desired song into the record (they used wax blocks instead of more effective plastics like polyvinyl back then) is incredibly complex and machines created to do this were not available until the 20th century. Edison had to physically emboss the music onto tin foiled cylinders, the only way they could have accomplished the recording and storing at the

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