Edison Graphophone

The beginnings of sound recordings date back to the second half of the 19th century, although the mechanical generation of a series of sounds has been possible since antiquity. Recorder pioneering devices evolved from sound recorders that recorded vibrations on smoked glass to Edison's phonograph, Tainter's graphophone, which recorded on wax-covered discs, Berliner's phonograph, which used molded discs, to the telegraph. Poulsen's first magnetic recording device. These media are very fragile, keeping them and retrieving records from them raises problems, but their value from a historical point of view is very high.

In 1886, Emil Berliner began work on his device, later called a gramophone. On May 4, 1887, he tried to obtain a patent for a process by which vibrations printed horizontally on a blackened disc of smoke were photographically copied and engraved in a similar disc, made of a resistant material. His request was rejected on the grounds that his method was too similar to that of Charles Cros. Later, Berliner obtained a patent for another sound production process. This time, the vibrations were drawn on a smoke-blackened glass disk, which he then used as a mold for the photographic printing of a zinc or copper disk. The ditches were then obtained by acid corrosion. His first zinc disk is preserved today at the Smithsonian Institution and is dated July 26, 1887. In November of the same year, Berliner published his invention and presented a glass disk lasting approx. 4 minutes. However, it was still impossible to mass produce zinc discs, all being in the experimental stage. In February 1888 he tried to record directly on the zinc discs (at 30 revolutions per minute), covering them with a layer of wax. This should have replaced the photographic mask in the acid corrosion phase. However, impurities have caused a number of problems. Celluloid discs followed (recorded at 60 rpm), but the material was too soft. In July 1889 Berliner succeeded in mass-producing hard rubber discs, which were pressed after a zinc mold. Because he did not receive a patent in the United States until 1896, Berliner began selling his products in Europe. In 1894 he published a list of records available for sale. They had a diameter of 17.45 cm (after 1895 of 17.78 cm) and were made of celluloid (after 1895 of hard rubber, and after 1897 of shellac). In 1898 Eldridge Johnson applied for a patent for a personal process for producing gramophone records, after in 1897 he had perfected the device with a spring-based motor. Johnson would be the founder of Victor Talking Machine Co., with his famous logo depicting the puppy Nipper looking into the funnel of the gramophone.