History of the Record Industry, 1877 – 1920s
A HISTORY OF THE EARLY RECORD INDUSTRY, 1877 – 1920s, by Louis Rastelli
Part One: From Invention to Industry: 1877-1900
From Vol. 2, No. 4 2004
The history of sound recording and the record industry stretches back to the mid-1800s, when methods of capturing sound were first devised. There is some evidence to suggest that as far back as the 1200s, the famously inventive English philosopher Friar Roger Bacon managed to crudely record a few words, and similar accounts of ancient novelty inventions exist. But it was during the great “mechanical age” that inventors and scientists focused on sound reproduction.
By the early 1800s, makers of ornate music boxes did brisk business with the upper classes. Aside from also being pure novelties aimed at those who could afford them, there isn’t much of a connection between music-box manufacturers and early records. However, some aspects of music boxes may have inspired the inventors of records. Like record players, music boxes had two basic elements: a surface with musical information on it, and an instrument that translated that information into sound. On music boxes, the information was stored as pegs or bumps sticking out from the surface of a cylinder or flat disk. As the cylinder or disk turned, its bumps plunked a melody from resonant pieces of metal placed next to them—not that different from a record needle vibrating on a record. Also like record players, some music boxes allowed you to change the cylinder or disk so that you could hear a different tune.
However, there was never even the notion that music boxes could someday record or reproduced sounds– they just made them.
Before the telephone was invented, no one would have imagined hearing disembodied human voices. And few (if any) writers before the telephone speculated that sounds would end up being captured just as photography (an 1820s invention) captured sights.
In the 1850’s, scientist Leon Scott de Martinville did construct a device, the Phonautograph, which graphed out sound much as a seismograph records earthquake vibrations. It contained the essentials of a record player: a hearing-horn focusing the sound onto a vibrating diaphragm (precursor to microphones), and a rigid pig’s hair sketching the diaphragm’s vibration onto a soot-covered paper cylinder. But the scientist never even thought of using the device to recreate the sounds he captured, even though all he would have had to do is use wax- instead of soot-covered paper and run his machine backwards. He eventually sold a version of his device which automatically transcribed telegraph signals.
By the 1850s, telegraph wires were sending messages across whole continents. The traffic of messages quickly got to the point where anything that made the system more efficient could make an inventor rich (very much like the capacity problems which still affect the Internet—essentially, there’s only so much you can fit through any bunch of wires, whether they’re dots and dashes or ones and zeroes.)
One of Thomas Edison’s first major inventions was the “quadruplex,” a system by which a single telegraph wire had four simultaneous signals pass through it, each on a different harmonic wavelength. This automatically quadrupled the number of telegrams that could be sent on one line and with the money from this invention, Edison set up his first research lab.
The idea that the wavelength of a current passing through telegraph wires could be divided into sections led many to experiment with sending audible tones across wires. Soon harmonic telegraphs were devised, which sent several Morse code signals, each one tapped out on one note in the musical scale, across one wire, with tuning forks resonating at various frequencies clicking out the messages at the receiving end.
Alexander Graham Bell was experimenting with exactly one such device when he noticed he could hear not just a click of a certain frequency, but when amplified with an electromagnet, he could briefly hear the vibrating sound of the tuning fork. He experimented with stronger and stronger electromagnets until a voice could be amplified, and the telephone was born.
Other inventors had hoped to send melodies across telegraph wires, with some believing this could become a novelty telegraph service—for example, sending a melody to a loved one, like a primitive “singing telegram.” But Bell’s telephone breakthrough was far more important, and caught most people off-guard– including the famously egotistical Edison, who always regretted not having invented the telephone himself.
