The device was originally a phonograph and was first invented by Thomas Edison back in 1877. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.ĪMES, Iowa - Back before Pandora, Spotify, or YouTube Red, many people used record players to listen to music. The use of the trademark of the dog listening the gramophone ('His Master's Voice') helped make it a successful product in the United States, and although the company was not called by that name, their records were marketed under the His Master's Voice' label.īerliner founded the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company in Montreal, Canada, the Deutsche Grammophon in Germany, and the U.K based Gramophone Co., Ltd.This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. The first records were made of glass, later zinc, and then plastic.īerliner sold the licensing rights to his patent for the gramophone and method of making records to the Victor Talking Machine Company, founded by the engineer who assisted Berliner to develop the turntable and mechanism. The disk or record was rotated on a turntable and a needle in the arm of the gramophone read the information in the grooves and transferred the sound to the speaker. In 1887, Emile Berliner, a German born American inventor working in Washington patented a successful system of sound recording on a disk, where the sound information was etched into the surface.

However each cylinder had to be recorded separately, preventing mass reproduction, and also resulting in differences in sound between each.

Invented at the Volta Laboratory established by Alexander Graham Bell, it used wax cylinders which lasted for multiple plays. The graphophone was an improved version of the phonograph and went into commercial production in about 1885. The phonograph was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, and its major disadvantage was that, as well as the reproduction being poor, each cylinder lasted for only one play. However in modern usage, the words 'gramophone' and 'phonograph' are both sometimes used to describe a gramophone or a gramophone record. For the gramophone, the music was recorded on a flat disk, unlike the phonograph and graphophone. In the evolution of mechanical music, the gramophone followed the phonograph and the graphophone, each of which was invented in the United States.

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