Phonograph History

Edison Cylinder Records pamplet 1903

Edison Phonograph ad

The Phonograph was first concieved by Thomas A Edison, inventer of the lightbulb, etc. Edison got the inspiration for the phonograph from two other inventions he had worked previously, the telegraph and the telephone. The idea came to Edison in 1877. He was working on a an invention thought would be able to transcribe sounds through the indentions on paper tape and play them back. This led Edison to believe that a telephone message could be recorded in a similar way and played back over the telegraph. He experimented with a diaphragm that was held against the rapidly moving paper tape to produce sounds, in doing so the vibrations of the human voice made indentions on the paper. Edison later revised this idea, changing the paper diaphragm to a metal diaphragm with a needle and adding a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. Edison's machine consisted of two of these diaphragm units, one used for recording and one used for playback. When someone spoke into the mouthpeice on the machine, there voice was recording on to the cylinder in what is called a hill-and-dale pattern. Hill-and-dale means that the voice was recorded vertically. Edison gave a basic sketch to a mechanic named John Keusi, and it is reported he finished the machine in 30 hours. When the machine was finished, Edison tried out the machine by singing "Mary Had A Little Lamb" into the mouth peice of the machine, to his astonishment, the words played back to him! It was originally believed that the date of this event was August 12, 1877, but some historians believe that the event probably did not occur until several months later, based on diary entries by Charles Batchelor, one of Edison's aids. Edison composed a list of possible future uses of the machine including, preservation of a language, keeping a family record, and preserving lectures made by teachers. But eventually the novelty wore off, and instead, Edison concentrated on inventing the light bulb.