Phonograph

A phonograph, later called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910), and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of sound.

In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm that produced sound waves coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.

The phonautograph was invented on March 25, 1857, by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville,[13] an editor and typographer of manuscripts at a scientific publishing house in Paris.

[14] One day while editing Professor Longet's Traité de Physiologie, he happened upon that customer's engraved illustration of the anatomy of the human ear, and conceived of "the imprudent idea of photographing the word."

In 1853 or 1854 (Scott cited both years) he began working on "le problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même" ("the problem of speech writing itself"), aiming to build a device that could replicate the function of the human ear.

As the glass plate was slid horizontally in a well formed groove at a speed of one meter per second, a person would speak into the trumpet, causing the membrane to vibrate and the stylus to trace figures[14] that were scratched into the lampblack.

[15] This was not the first time someone had used a device to create direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects, as tuning forks had been used in this way by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807.

[22] By late 1857, with support from the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, Scott's phonautograph was recording sounds with sufficient precision to be adopted by the scientific community, paving the way for the nascent science of acoustics.

The phonautograms were then digitally converted by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who were able to play back the recorded sounds, something Scott had never conceived of.

[26] The author of this article called the device a phonographe, but Cros himself favored the word paleophone, sometimes rendered in French as voix du passé ('voice of the past').

[citation needed] Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception.

"In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which few preliminary remarks were offered.

On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he wrote in retrospect: "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, although there was little of the scratching that later was a prominent feature of the flat disc.

"[33] The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at the Royal Society of Victoria, writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited.

'Rule Britannia' was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of 'He's a jolly good fellow,' which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a cracked voice.

Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon")[36] up to thousands of times in a studio during his recording career.

[41] A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri, has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis.

A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one that is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned.

[clarification needed] These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them.

However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system.

The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position.

[46] After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace.

Invented in 1927 for sleep learning, the Psychophone featured a clock mounted on top of a phonograph, with a repeater device for rewinding and continously replaying records.

[58] In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all-transistor phonograph models TPA-1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Spherical styli are generally more robust than other types, but do not follow the groove as accurately, giving diminished high frequency response.

There are a number of derivations of the basic elliptical type, including the Shibata or fine line stylus, which can more accurately reproduce high frequency information contained in the record groove.

Before settling on that standard, there were many different equalizations in use, including EMI, HMV, Columbia, Decca FFRR, NAB, Ortho, BBC transcription, etc.

[82] Although largely replaced since the introduction of the compact disc in 1982, record albums still sold in small numbers throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but gradually sidelined in favor of CD players and tape decks in home audio environments.

[87] Notably, Japanese company Panasonic brought back its well-known advanced Technics SL-1200 at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show[88] during which Sony also headlined a turntable, amid increasing interest in the format.

[90] At the low-end of the market, Crosley has been especially popular with its suitcase record players[91] and have played a big part in the vinyl revival and its adoption among younger people and children in the 2010s.