Until the late 19th century, every performance vanished as it ended. This lesson covers the machines that first caught sound, and the one format that won.
A trace with no playback
The Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph on 25 March 1857. It drew sound waves as a line on paper, but the line could not be played back. Only in 2008 were several phonautograms made before 1861 turned into sound, by scanning them optically and processing the scans on a computer.
Edison's phonograph
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. It cut the vibrations of sound into a groove on a rotating cylinder and played them back. His tinfoil recording of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" that year, now lost, has been called the first recorded verse. In the 1880s Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory improved it into the graphophone, with wax-coated cardboard cylinders.
Berliner's disc and the 78
In the 1890s Emile Berliner moved recording from cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove, and called his player the gramophone. For about half a century records were made of shellac and turned at 78 revolutions per minute, hence "78s"; by 1925 that speed was becoming the industry standard.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1857 | Phonautograph patented: sound drawn, not replayed |
| 1877 | Edison's phonograph records and plays back |
| 1880s | Graphophone: wax-coated cylinders |
| 1890s | Berliner's flat disc and gramophone |
| By 1925 | 78 rpm becoming the standard |
Recording without electricity
Early records were made acoustically: a horn collected the sound and piped it to a diaphragm that moved the cutting stylus. Sensitivity and frequency range were poor and the response uneven, which is why acoustic recordings have their instantly recognisable tone. One early performer remembered keeping his mouth about six inches from the horn and holding back his voice to get a clear result: the first studio technique was distance.
Sources
Every date, name, tempo and origin on this page comes from these pages, read on 2026-10-24.