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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Who invented Gramophone - Record-Player?

First, Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph. The telephone had just been invented.
Edison realized that since it worked because of the vibrations in the diaphragm of the telephone mouthpiece when somebody talked into it, if some kind of stylus could be attached, then it could produce a pattern on something soft, so the sound could be recorded permanently. It should then be possible to play it back, using a similar stylus, and so reproduce the original sound.
His first phonograph used a cylinder of tin foil. A stylus, moved along it by a screw while the cylinder was turning, cut a sound into the till foil from a microphone. To make it play back, a hearing-tube with a stylus attached was used instead of the microphone.

That was in 1877, when Edison himself recited the nursery rhyme, Mary had a little lamb’ into his machine.

Over the next few years he improved his invention, eventually using waxed cylinders instead of tin foil.
The phonograph cut grooves as the stylus moved up and down.
The modern disc , where the stylus moves from side side instead, was invented by Emile Berliner and was first demonstrated in Philadelphia, USA in 1888. The first disc were made of vulcanized rubber.

Records made of shellac Records made of Shellac came in to being in 1897, the same year as the first disc recording studio was opened by the Berliner Gramophone Company.

By 1898 the Gramophone Company had opened in Britain and a factory which they owned opened in Hanover, Germany, to mass produce seven-inch records. Germany, to mass produce seven-inch records.

Paper labels appeared on records in 1900-the famous “His Master’s Voice” Picture was the first (now known as HMV).

The Decca Company manufactured the first portable (wind-up) gramophone in 1913, and the first disc to be recorded electrically instead of mechanically appeared in 1920. Electric gramophones or record-players came in 1925.

The first long-playing records (LPs) actually appeared in 1904, but those playing at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute, as now, were not produced until 1931.

Discs made of shellac broke easily, but these began to be replaced by discs made of almost unbreakable vinylite in 1946.

That led the way to LPs as we know them today, when Peter Gold mark developed the first ‘Microgroove ‘disc in 1948, with full production starting a year later. This marked the end starting a year later. This marked the end of the old ‘78s’ – records playing at 78 revolutions per minute.

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