Musical History and Trivia

[HoneyBearFarms]

Thomas Edison is often given credit for the invention of the phonograph but his 1877 invention, a wax cylinder shaped like a tube inside a modern roll of toilet paper was a failed format that went extinct in the early 1900's.

The flat recording disc that became the industry standard for most of the twentieth century was the brainchild of a self-educated German Jewish immigrant American name Emile Berliner, who in 1888 developed a method of using acid to etch sound grooves into a zinc-coated circular plate, then making rubber-coated copies and playing them back on a manually operated turn table with a floating like stylus to an amplifier horn. Berliner referred to his invention as the "gram-o-phone".

 

[HoneyBearFarms]

When Emile Berliner demonstrated his new "gram-0-phone" at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, it seemed whimsical to the Victorian era mind, and the only client he attracted was a German toy manufacturer who hired him to create talking doll and a small children's record player.

In order to fit the hard rubber plates inside the company's dolls, Berliner miniturized them to three inches in diameter, with less then a minute of sound capacity. His discs for the kiddie players were a little larger at five inches. The recordings were nursery rhymes, little songs and recitations. The playing speed was roughly thirty revolutions per minute, but since these toys had to be steadily hand cranked, no correct speed really existed.

 

[herMaster1111]

Very interesting did not know that