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The phonograph, or gramophone, was the most common device for playing recorded sound from the 1870s through the 1980s. more...

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Terminology

Usage of these terms is somewhat different in American English and English outside North America; see usage note below. In more modern usage, this device is often called a turntable, record player, or record changer. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the alternative term talking machine was sometimes used. The phonograph was the first device for recording and replaying sound.

The term phonograph meaning "sound writer", is derived from the Greek words φωνη (meaning 'sound' or 'voice' and transliterated as phone) and γραφη (meaning 'writing' and transliterated as graphe). Similar related terms gramophone and graphophone have similar root meanings. The coinage, particularly the use of the "-graph" root, may have been influenced by the then-existing words "phonographic" and "phonography," which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 the New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class," and in 1859 the New York State Teachers' Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings.

F. B. Fenby was the original author of the word “phonograph” (which literally translates as sound writer). An inventor in Worcester, MA, he was granted a patent in 1863 for an unsuccessful device called the “Electro-Magnetic Phonograph”. His concept detailed a system that would record a sequence of keyboard strokes onto paper tape. Although no model or workable device was ever made, it is often seen as a link to the concept of punched paper for player piano rolls (1880s), as well as Herman Hollerith's punch card tabulator (used in the 1890 census), a distant precursor to the modern computer.

Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice it has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording.

History

The phonautograph

The earliest known invention of a phonographic recording device was the phonautograph, invented by Edouard-Leon Scott and patented on March 25, 1857. It could transcribe sound to a visible medium, but had no means to play back the sound after it was recorded. The device consisted of a horn or barrel that focused sound waves onto a membrane to which a hog's bristle was attached, causing the bristle to move and enabling it to inscribe a visual medium. Initially, the phonautograph made recordings onto a lamp-blackened glass plate. A later version (see image) used a medium of lamp-blackened paper on a drum or cylinder—an arrangement to which Thomas Edison's later invention would bear striking resemblance. Another version would draw a line representing the sound wave on a roll of paper. The phonautograph was a laboratory curiosity for the study of acoustics. It was used to determine the frequency of a given musical pitch and to study sound and speech; it was not widely understood until after the development of the phonograph that the waveform recorded by the phonautograph was a record of the sound wave that needed only a playback mechanism to reproduce the sound.

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