Who invented the gramophone?

Who invented the gramophone?

Early attempts to design a music-playing gadget began in 1877 when Thomas Edison invented his tin-foil phonograph. The word ‘phonograph’ was Edison’s trade name for his device, which played recorded sounds from round cylinders. The sound quality on the phonograph was bad, and each recording lasted just for one only play.

On November 8, 1887 Emile Berliner, a German immigrant working in Washington DC, patented a successful system of sound recording. Berliner was the first inventor to stop recording on cylinders, and start recording on flat discs or records.

The first records were made of glass, later zinc and eventually plastic. A spiral groove with sound information was etched into the flat record. The record was rotated on the gramophone. The ‘arm’ of the gramophone held a needle that read the grooves in the record by vibration and transmitted the information to the gramophone speaker.

Berliner’s discs (records) were the first sound recording that could be mass-produced by creating master recordings from which molds were made. From each mold, hundreds of disks were pressed. Emile Berliner founded ‘The Gramophone Company’ to mass manufacture his sound discs (records) and the gramophone that played them. To help promote his gramophone system Berliner did two things, he persuaded popular artists to record their music using his system. Two famous artists who signed early on with Berliner’s company were Enrico Caruso and Dame Nellie Melba. The second smart marketing move Berliner made came in 1908, when he used Francis Barraud’s painting of “His Master’s Voice’ as company’s official trademark.