Thomas Alva Edison is the man credited with much of the work for the initial development of the wax cylinder and the first recordable media available to consumers. Edison was working on a telegraph transcriber that would punch holes in a piece of paper (much like the stock-ticker of early 1900s) that could also write the telegraph message once it was written. He did this by affixing a steel spring to the little read/write pin, and when that spring hit the dots on the paper, it would bounce up and gave off a noise that was a "light musical, rhythmic sound, resembling human talk heard indistinctly." This put into Edison's head the idea that audio could be transcribed to a recordable media; he soon envisioned a way to transcribe phone messages. (ie one would say a message into the phone, then take it to the local phone directory, and they would call somebody up and play that message, like protovoicemail.) Edison experimented with a small needle pricking tape for a long time, and somewhere along that time (1877) he started to mess around with tin foil instead, which was much more durable a medium. Edison soon decided on the cylinder for his experiments, and commisioned one of his most trusted builders to create an apparatus from his drawings.

Edison experimented with a small needle pricking tape for a long time, and somewhere along that time (1877) he started to mess around with tin foil instead, which was much more durable a medium. Edison soon decided on the cylinder for his experiments, and commisioned one of his most trusted builders to create an apparatus from his drawings. One would crank the coil while speaking into it and a diaphragm would move a needle, inscribing the voice onto the cylinder. The same needle would then read those vibrations and play it out the diaphragm. The life on these recordings were very very short, only a couple plays, so it was demonstrated only as a curiosity for much of its life. Later, Edison decided to go to wax cylinders, in the early 1900s after Alexander Graham Bell and others started making considerable process. Edison sucessfully made a business of his wax cylinders and apparatuses for recording were being sold for only $50.00!

The man behind the modern phonograph and the rise of the flat disc is Emile Berliner, b. 1851. Berliner was born in Germany but came to America at age nineteen (1870). He had an affinity for invention and was picked up by Alexander Graham Bell for his improvements upon the telephone signal transmitter. (this was shortly after Edison had sold another improved transmitter to Bell's greatest competitor) His foot in the door, he did little else of consequence for the fledgling telephone industry. Two years after his stint with Bell he turned to improving the existing phonograph, which at the time read peaks-and-valleys and was highly skip prone. His first thought was to record records with lateral motion, which he (correctly) believed would improve sound quality and tracking to boot. Berliner also cooked up the idea of coating the records in a thin fatty film for recording, recording the track, and then immersing the record in an acid bath to remove all of the metal shards left behind by the crude needle. This took time and experimentation and he had to find a substance that would write well but would also be resistant to the acid bath. By 3-1888 he was making records with his new direct chemical process though, experimenting with all sorts of different instruments. In my opinion the ultimate breakthrough came when he developed the technique discussed in the 'pressing' part of the webpage - the technique of cutting a record, making a master metal positive, and then a metal negative from that, from which records could be mass-produced quickly and reliably.

In the very late 19th century he started getting funding investors and the gramaphone would pop up on the market as one of the many different recordable media available. Wax cylinders were also very popular, in the early years. Soon it was made apparent that flat records were just plain better - easily stored, easily reproduced. Victor became the name of the gramaphone (ie Hoover for the vacuum) as that was the brand name that popularized the player. Another brand Vittrola was also a competitor for the market and did well, but Victor went on with technology and spawned the Columbia record label, which must have been the first major record label in history. Thus the groundwork was set for the electric record players that we discuss in the next page, the stylus...

Onto stylus styles... or...

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