In 1900 a court de facto killed the Berliner Gramophone Company.Įldridge Johnson obtained Berliner's patent rights and started his own gramophone company in New Jersey, which in 1901 was renamed Victor Talking Machine Company, which quickly became the leader in Were made in Washington and sales were managed from New York.Įldridge Johnson in New Jersey was manufacturing spring-driven gramophones for Berliner. His Berliner Gramophone Company was based in Philadelphia, although the disks The new device proved to be popular with masses that were eager to listen to the voices of the famous opera stars, starting with Ferruccio Giannini singing Giuseppe Verdi's "La Donna E` Mobile" (released by Berliner in January 1896).īy 1904 Enrico Caruso had sold one million records. In 1895 Berliner also switched to disks made of shellac. In 1894 Berliner began selling his rubber disks in the USA, after trying them out in his native Germany. In other words, Berliner's records were meant for the mass production of prerecorded music, not for the office. In 1887, a German immigrant in Washington, Emile Berliner, built the first "gramophone", that played sound recorded on a flat disk (as opposed to Edison's cylinder), using a technique (the lateral vibration) originally developed by Leon Scott for his phonautograph.īerliner's "records", initially made of celluloid and then of rubber, were more expensive to manufacture but more durable and more easily duplicated. The problem with cylinders is that they degraded after just a couple of listening experiences, and hand cranking could never be smooth, thus causing distortions in the sound. In 1890 the Columbia Phonograph Company, founded in 1889 in Washington by a former stenographer, Edward Easton, started selling Edison's phonographs and cylinders as a regional subsidiary of North American, but after 1894, when Lippincott died and his North American disbanded, Columbia became Edison's main competitor.Įaston's original market was the same as Edison's: to replace stenographers.Ī wax cylinder typically played at a speed of 120 RPM and lasted two minutes. In 1888 a businessman named Jesse Lippincott acquired Edison's phonograph business and started the North American Phonograph Company, and initially he targeted the office, where it could replace stenographers (needless to say, stenographers opposed the invention) but then moved into the business of coin-operated phonographs for entertainment. In 1889 Louis Glass invented the coin-operated phonograph for penny arcades where people could listen to prerecorded Edison cylinders. In 1888 a businessman named Jesse Lippincott acquired Edison's phonograph business and started the North American Phonograph Company, and, again, he targeted the office, where it could replace stenographers (needless to say, stenographers opposed the invention). In 1886 Alexander Bell (the inventor of the telephone) introduces a better cylinder, made of wax instead of Edison's tin foil, and Edison soon adopted the idea. The phonograph transmitted sound by a purely mechanical operation (no electricity). It was meant for the office, not the home. In 1877 Thomas Edison built the first "phonograph" that could record soundĬharles Cross had a similar idea a few months earlier in France.Įdison's phonograph was meant as a telegraph that transmitted voice recordings rather than coded messages.
Only in 2008 were scientists able to reproduce his voice.
Scott had no way (and no intention) to play back his recordings. Own voice, the earliest recording of the human voice in history. Into a visual representation (for the purpose of studying the properties of A History of the Record A Brief History of the RecordĮdouard-Leon Scott invented the phonautograph in 1857 to turn aural stimuli
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