Posts Tagged ‘Emile Berliner’
THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC: Part 25. The Power Of Electricity. The History Of The Phonograph. Chapter 3
Posted by Angelika in THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC Monday, 18 January 2010 14:37 No Comments
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
THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC. Part 24: How A Business Machine And A Childs Toy Met In The Middle. The History Of The Phonograph. Chapter 2
Posted by Angelika in THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC Sunday, 10 January 2010 12:42 No Comments
Part 24. How A Business Machine And A Child’s Toy met In The Middle.
The History of the Phonograph. Chapter 2
In the last episode we found out about the invention of the first ever, audio recording device, and Thomas Edison’s creation the Phonograph, that started an r-evolution that would change the world.
Today we continue our story looking at an invention that became the humble record player we know and love today.
In 1886, Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell invented a device that used wax coated cylinders that were engraved using a vertical method that became known as hill and dale. Their device was named the Graphophone.
Emile's wife was going to kill him when she realized he chopped up the garden hose..
In 1887, Emile Berliner, a German born American came up with a method of using a lateral stylus movement that imprinted it’s vibrations as it moved in a spiral along a zinc disc.
He named this invention the Gramophone. (any one watch the Grammy’s??)
Looking at early patents from Edison, it’s clear that he also considered the idea of recording sound as a spiral on disc, but as the velocity and pressure of the stylus is greater the closer to the middle the disc, he opted to go for the more “scientifically correct” cylinder where the velocity and pressure remain constant.
It’s interesting to note, that Edison didn’t see the phonograph’s primary use as a music player, and initially wasn’t marketed in this way at all.
In a suggested list of it’s 10 most useful applications, Edison listed 8 of them based around the voice for educational, business and archival purposes, only 2 refer to music reproduction including music-boxes and toys. (and none of them refer to using them as placemats in cafes??!)
Despite Edison’s intentions for the Phonograph to become a business machine, by 1889, something of a commercial recording industry had started up. The first phonographic parlor was opened in San Francisco, here customers would select which songs to listen to on their hired phonograph salon.
Initially musicians would have to record into several phonographs at once and keep repeating the performance until enough copies were created to satisfy the demand.The recordings were all made acoustically, the music was recorded through a horn that led to the recording diaphragm.
Both the frequency range and the sensitivity was of low quality, and wax was a poor medium for capturing music.
Singer’s would almost have to put their face into the recording horn, apparently standard violins were barely usable, but Cello’s and double bases were completely un-recordable.
But despite all this, the novelty value of hearing music jump off a cylinder or disc was immense. The start of the century saw the industry start to pick up speed.
Canned music!
Phonograph cylinders were sold in cardboard tubes, with cardboard lids at each end. These tubes were used to protect the recordings. These containers and the shape of the cylinders (together with the “tinny” sound of early records compared to live music) prompted bandleader John Phillip Sousa to famously make fun of the records as canned music. But he did still record on them.
Click here to hear 1 of Sousa’s recordings.
Berliner’s invention of the gramophone gave the industry a much-needed boost, he also invented a method of creating a matrix (or master disc) that could be used to duplicate almost unlimited copies.
Despite that fact that his first commercial applications were for toys, he quickly realized the gramophones’ musical potential and hired famous musicians to be recorded to promote his discs.
The maximum available duration had a big impact on music of the time.
By the beginning of the 20th century both cylinder s and the early discs played for 2 minutes.
In 1903 Victor released a 12 inch disc that could record a whopping 3 minutes 30 seconds! This had a massive influence on the duration of commercial music, and to a very large degree is where we get the short radio friendly edits of pop songs today.
Here’s a clip of Jene Bailey’s Orchestra playing “All Aboard For Heaven” c. April 1925 it’s played from a restored 1901 Zon- O-
Phone “Home” disc phonograph or Gramophone.
That’s not to say that longer tracks were not recorded. One of the workarounds to this problem was to release sets of records. The first multi-record release happened in 1903. HMV England released the very first complete recording of an Opera, Verdi’s ‘Erani’ and it came in a tidy little package of 40 single sided discs!
The Famous His Masters Voice Dog, He'd be 23,000 years old now in dog years.
In America at the start of 1900, there were 2 leading flat disc manufactures that were far bigger than the rest, Columbia whose discs were played at 80 rpm and Victor whose discs played at a speed of 76rpm. The fact that both companies’ discs could be played on each others respective players meant that eventually the speeds met in the middle and 78rpm became the standard for the fist few decades.
So the phonograph and the gramophone had grown up a little, starting as a business machine and a children’s toy respectively, people were starting to enjoy them both as a way of connecting to music. And remember this is all before electricity was used in households!
The next 30 years saw many changes as the industry matured into something the world had never seen before.
Find out what in part 25 CLICK HERE.
CLICK HERE for the previous chapter
CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music