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Part 27. “Get Hip To The Beat Daddio!”
The History of the Phonograph. Chapter 5
Welcome Back!
Rudolph Valentino - wow man like whatta Rebel..
Ok, so in the last chapter, we covered the technological revolution that put the record player firmly into the no1 position as the tool for audio playback.
But at the same time another revolution was happening across the western world, especially in America.
In February 1949, RCA Victor released the very first 45rpm single, only 7 inches in diameter it had a large hole in it’s center so that it could be fitted to devices that had an automatic playing mechanism, allowing singles to be dropped down in a stack on top of each other per play.
These singles had a playing time of 4 minutes each side and were made from Vinyl or polystyrene.
Singles were mass-produced and cheap to buy, they were so wide spread that they could often be found on the counter of the local drugstore.
To coincide with this new hobby of collecting singles the Top 40 was started by Todd Storz from the KOWH radio station.
But the single was not so much the revolution but part of it’s fuel.
The revolutionaries appeared on the scene sprouting strange words and listening to far out beats. The Teenager had arrived.
From the country that brought you pancake stacks comes the 45 stacks.. not as nutricious, but certainly tasty..
Before the 1950’s there was almost no transitionary time between childhood and adulthood. Children were taught to think as their parents, have the same thoughts as their parents and generally act like mini me’s. You either went to school a child and left school as an adult or you enlisted as a child and came back a man.
But starting in the 50’s young people 16-18 started ‘hanging out’ doing their own thing and listening to their own music, they devoured pop music and made it their own, they had enough pocket money to afford 45’s and portable radios, and with the smaller record size came smaller more portable 45 only players. The teenagers didn’t have phonographs, only squares called them that, they played their singles on ‘record players’. The music scene gave them their own language, and with all that came their ‘own ideas’.
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What started as the 50′s rebel who was like this..
With the advent of the 60’s and Rock’n’roll, this developed even further, the ‘devils music’ made teenagers question authority and believe in the ideals of their own generation. The ‘50’s teenager was old enough to really start to make waves, not the least being in a band and making their own music.
Granted there were also other socio/political factors involved, but for this discourse lets mainly focus on the music side of things.
Ended up like this! (go Jimi!!)
The fab four, take note of Ringo in his Cross-dressing phase - eat your heart out Bowie.
This was an incredible boom for the record industry, for the music industry, and for radio and television stations. This is what gave the teenager power. As much as their parents may have been against this new behavior, it was the money that they gave their kids that helped fuel it.
The teenager still drives the music market today. Channel V and MTV’s core demographic is between 12 – 15 years of age.
Also almost a small side note, in 1963 with nothing more than a small tiny splash, Phillips introduced the first compact cassette tape. But it wouldn’t be until this little wonder was a teenager itself before anyone in the music industry would start to take notice.
Some people say that during the 70’s, as people were recovering from the shock of the 60’s, they took the best of the decade before and improved on them. Rock’nRoll, free love and giving young people a voice against corruption and war to name a few.
If you believe this to be true or not, it’s true as far as the rsord player is concerned.
CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHY IN PART 28
CLICK HERE for the previous chapter
CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music
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Part 25. The Power of Electricity.
The History of the Phonograph. Chapter 3
Because the sounding horns were so big, people started to see just how big they could make their hats..
... and he won!
Welcome back! In Chapter 2, we discovered how the phonograph and the gramophone became linked to the music industry. Starting out as a novelty, people began to use it to treasure their favorite music. Unfortunately both the recording methods and the playback left a lot to be desired.
Which is a good segue to kick off our next chapter..
Thanks to the invention of the vacuum tube in 1915, the 20’s saw the record player enjoy 2 big jumps in it’s evolution.
Fittingly the first was in the recording of music and the second was in the playback.
As often happens in highly competitive technological industries, the development of alternatives to the carbon microphone (the transducer used in telephones), happened at relatively the same time from multiple places.
Please note: we will cover the evolution of the microphone in much greater depth in another thread.
The Carbon microphone (or button mike) was invented in 1876 by Emile Berliner a week before Edison, but unfortunately is next to useless to record music with, as it has a terrible signal to noise ratio and woeful frequency range. So as mentioned in part 24, bands would have to crowd together to play before a large recording horn, the loudest instruments were put at the back and the quietest in front.
I always though microphone was a silly name, look they don't resemble small telephones at all!
Although the idea of a condenser mike had been around since the early days of the telephone, it’s very low output made it also next to useless, but thanks to the invention of the vacuum tube amplifier, the problems of output and high impedance were no longer a problem as the sound could be amplified and then sent to drive an electromagnetic recording head. Suddenly the frequency range that could be recorded grew substantially as did the level of volume that could be played back.
Bands and Orchestras could sit and play in the normal positions, and the change in quality of the recording was magnitudes better.
In 1917, E.C.Wente of Bell Labs developed the first modern condenser microphone, but the early ones were problematic, it was not until the mid 20’s did these
microphones really start to shine. (or was that the the battery powered torch?)
Many competitors such as Western Electric, RCA and Neuman, also started to release condenser mikes and the refinement and evolution of these transducers continues today.
It would have pretty useless to improve the recording quality if you couldn’t hear the difference right?
The worlds 1st electronical record player.. and yes electronical IS a WORD!
Well in 1925 they did that too.
In 1925 Victor introduced it’s Victor Orthophonic Victrola, it was groundbreaking because it was specifically designed to play electrically recorded disks, without going too far into the details, it had a relatively flat frequency response equaling clearer, sharper more vibrant sounding music.
Thanks to wikipedia, here’s a quote from the front page of the New York Times after it’s first public performance.
“The audience broke into applause… John Philip Sousa [said]: ‘Gentleman [sic], that is a band. This is the first time I have ever heard music with any soul to it produced by a mechanical talking machine.’ … The new instrument is a feat of mathematics and physics. It is not the result of innumerable experiments, but was worked out on paper in advance of being built in the laboratory….”
Turntables at the time were operated by a spring driven motor, that the user would have to re-wind for each record played, but as electricity became more prevalent in the home, the clock work motor was replaced by an electric one, and the needle and diaphragm was replaced by a pick up, this was usually a stylus made from steel or sapphire that was attached to a transducer that would then convert the sound to an electric signal. The playing (exponential) horn, was replaced with an amplifier and loud speaker.
In 1927: The Automatic Music Instrument Co introduced a new nifty device – the jukebox .nuff said.
The Great Depression, was a time of much turbulence for most industry’s and the record industry was not spared, unlike music boxes and player pianos/piano players the record industry managed to survive, and return to thrive. Unfortunately not before their were plenty of casualties, with many phonographic and gramophone companies merging or going out of business.
The industry pretty much ground to halt in October of 1929, when Wall Street crashed.
People needed their money for far more important things than buying records, especially as those already with a radio were provided music and entertainment for free.
In fact due to losing massive market share against electronic recording, and elctronical playback gramophones, Edison discontinued the production of phonograph records and their players. Some versions of the story state that Edison who was 82 years old at the time did this the day before the Crash!
To give you an idea just how badly the industry was hit, in 1927, 987,000 machines were produced and 104,000,000 records were sold. In 1932 those numbers dropped to 40,000 and 6,000,000 respectively.
A much older, but much more comfortable looking Edison, By this time he had invented a chair with 4 legs.
In order to try and raise sales in the 30’s record companies started to market collections of music based on 1 genre or performer, these albums of records were specially designed and usually had artwork on the front and liner notes on the back and/or the inside. Most of these albums consisted of 3 or 4 records with each disk having a song on each side. In 1948, when12inch Long Players (LP) started to be released they normally had the same amount of tracks on the 1 disc as the 78rpm albums used to, this is why an LP has come to be known as an album.
The record industry may have survived the Depression, but it’s father Thomas Edison didn’t, he died at the age of 84 in 1931.
And on this rather final note we’ll end our current chapter on the phonograph.
The Phonograph was dead and so was it’s creator. But the gramophone was still alive and in place to become the dominant musical influence of the 20th century.
More will be revealed next in Chapter 4 of our series on the history of the record player. CLICK HERE.
CLICK HERE for the previous chapter
CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music