One hundred and forty six years ago on December
6th 1877 a young Thomas Edison walked into the offices of Scientific American with a strange
device. In turning a crank, he amazed everyone there with the recording, “Good morning, how do
you do? How do you like the photograph?” Today recorded sound is everywhere, virtually all music
that you listen to has been recorded. Television, radio and the internet are full of recorded
sounds; the words you hear coming out of my mouth right now have been recorded. Heck,
in a given day many of us probably spend more time listening to recorded sounds than
to live sounds. And yet the ability to record sound is a relatively recent development in
human history. And the invention of recording devices and media had a monumental impact on
culture; one that deserves to be remembered. Before modern technology allowed humans
to actually record sounds the only way to record music was to write it down. The
concept was similar, to allow a piece of music to be repeated so that others could
hear it outside of any single performance, in that way sheet music is essentially a set of
instructions. For most of human history that was essentially the only way to preserve a tune or
melody. It has long been postulated that sounds, not just music could have been accidentally
recorded on something like pottery but modern studies have largely discarded this possibility.
It wasn't until the early modern era that serious efforts were made to actually record sound.
Some of the earliest attempts to record sound involved obtaining tracings by attaching a stylus
to a tuning fork, or other object as it vibrated; a crude way of recording information about the
sound, but later in the century numerous inventors were working on more sophisticated recording
systems. Thomas Edison traditionally receives the credit for the invention of sound recording
with his introduction of the photograph in 1877, however as with many inventions he was not the
only inventor working on the concept. Decades earlier in France, another inventor was making
important contributions to sound recording though even he didn't realize how significant his
accomplishments were. Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville was born in Paris in 1817 where he
became a printer, his work as a printer allowed him access to the latest scientific publications,
including a scientific examination of the ear. Around 1853 de Martinville became interested
in finding a way to transcribe speech in a manner similar to the still young technology
of photography. As he put it, he conceived of the imprudent idea of photographing the word. He
wanted a machine that could solve the problem of speech writing itself, “Might a writer dictate
a fleeting dream in the middle of the night, and upon waking find not only that it has been
written, but rejoice in his freedom from the pen. The instrument that struggles with and chills
expression.” he wondered. Martinville began designing a machine based on the human ear which
he figured already took sound waves and made sense of them. He made a large horn out of plaster of
paris and used an elastic membrane to mimic the tympanum. Several levers mimicked the ossicles,
tiny bones which helped transmit sound in the human ear, which then moved a stylus which would
leave an impression on paper covered in lampblack, or soot. On January 26th 1857 he applied for a
patent on his device which he received 2 months later on March 25th for what he called a
phonautograph. Martinville built several prototypes with the help of instrument maker
Rudolph Koenig and successfully produced numerous phonautograms that visualized sound in soot.
Martinville never seems to have considered that what he recorded could be played back, and his
machine was never designed to do such a thing. Instead he hoped to be able to discern from the
scratched marks what had actually been said so that users could record something and later look
back at the recording verbatim, and read it as one might read text without the need for notes or
memory. Unfortunately he never figured out how to read a phonautogram. Using his device Martinville
recorded numerous sounds including folk songs, music and the recitation of lyrics or poetry, but
no one considered the recordings replayable and the phonautograph became a footnote, described
as a curio. That was until 150 years later when researchers from first sounds rediscovered several
of the phonautograms and using modern techniques, were able to play them back. In 2008 they
successfully restored a recording of a human being singing the French folk song of Au clair
de la lune. (Recording being played) And this accomplishment meant that Edison's 1877 recording
of Mary Had a Little Lamb was no longer the oldest example of a discernible human voice recording.
According to First Sounds the Au clair de la lune recording was made on April 9th 1860, several
earlier recordings have been recovered but remain unintelligible. Numerous other sounds have been
recovered from Martinvilles work including an 1860 recording of the first lines of an Italian play
as well as an 1857 recording of a cornet playing a scale. In 1874 Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence
Blake built a machine very similar to Scotts with the exception that it used an actual excised
human ear that vibrated a stylus as part of Bell's efforts to teach the deaf. Just before Edison in
1877, a French poet and scientist Charles Cros made the conceptual connection between recorded
sound as a traced line and actually reproducing it. He sent a sealed envelope with his idea to the
French Academy of Sciences to prove his priority of conception on April 30th. Cros's most important
thought was that the marks that a stylist made could be used to restore the original acoustic
signal. Cros however never made any significant attempt at actually producing what he dubbed a
Paleophone. In 1877 Addison was actually working on telegraphs and the telephone, he was developing
a machine, a telegraphic repeater, that could take telegraphic messages and record them on paper
which could then be resent over the telegraph at any speed. At high speeds the tape made a noise
resembling human talk heard indistinctly, and led him to consider whether a telephone message could
be recorded and replayed. In May he produced a machine similar to the phonautograph which
had a diaphragm and embossing point that made indentations in paper. In July he made a note in
his notebook about an experiment recording sound, “There's no doubt that I shall be able to store
up and reproduce automatically the human voice perfectly.” He soon dubbed the imagined device
a phonograph. He soon replaced the paper with tin foil wrapped around a metal cylinder and
conceived of a machine that had two diaphragm and needle units, one to record and a second to
play back. Speaking into a mouthpiece the stylist indents the tin foil in a hill and dale pattern,
the device was manually cranked to record and playback. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to
an associate Swiss born Machinist John Kruesi who quickly built a model. The first words Edison
recorded were Mary Had a Little Lamb, and the device played them back. (Edison recording) “Mary
had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure
to go.” The traditional date for the invention is August 12th 1877, however there's evidence
that it wasn't built until later. The earliest reporting on Edison's talking machine appeared
in May, and he officially announced his invention on November 21st 1877. He applied for a patent in
December which was granted on February 19th 1878. According to Scientific American, “On December 6th
1877, a young man came into the office and placed before the editors a small simple machine.
With a turn of the crank the machine spoke.” The first photograph was a sensation,
so unexpected by the public that it gave Edison the nickname Wizard of Menlo Park.
Demonstrations of the machine were popular but sales were lackluster. The recordings were of low
quality with one listener saying, “It sounded to my ear like someone singing about a half mile
away.” The tin foil recordings were fragile and easily damaged and Edison was soon engrossed
in experiments to make a practical light bulb. “It remained a toy and nothing more for years.”
Scientific American reported. The next improvement came from Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Sumner
Tainter and others at the Volta Laboratory. Beginning in 1879 they worked to improve Edison's
photograph, eventually turning to wax as a better material for recording. Basic patents for wax
recording were granted in 1886. Using a chisel instead of a stylus, they engraved the recording
into a cylinder which made a considerably better recording. Their initial machine, made in 1881,
was sealed into a box and given to the Smithsonian which wasn't opened until 1937. It contained a
recording that recited from Hamlet. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio than are
dreamt of in your philosophy.” Bell and Tainter's machine which they called a graphophone
inspired Edison to improve his phonograph, the machine he created however was essentially
the same as Bell and Tainters and he purchased a license under Bell's patent to sell his improved
phonograph. Meanwhile a German-American inventor named Emil Berliner began work on his own sound
production machine; he was granted a patent for his gramophone in 1887. His invention would
eventually turn away from Edison and Bell's cylinders to a flat disc which offered more ways
to make multiple copies as the cylinders needed to be made individually. He etched the grooves with
acid into zinc discs. Initially the machines were seen primarily as automatic stenographers although
Edison envisioned them recording family sayings, music, preserving language and photographic books
for the blind. The 1890s saw the machines take their place as entertainment devices. In 1896
Edison founded the National Phonograph Company. The small cylinders generally could only play back
about 2 minutes, though larger 4 minute cylinders were introduced to compete with discs which could
generally play longer. It wasn't until 1901 that a method of easily reproducing cylinders was
developed which replaced engraving with a molding process. While Berliner ran into legal issues,
his system eventually became the basis for the Victor Talking Machine Company, discs would come
to dominate the market in the 20th century. Early discs were made of hard rubber and then shellac.
Vinyl, or vinylite as it was originally called, was first used in the 1930s in radio. Vinyl discs
were used in World War II for popular V-Discs which provided music to US soldiers starting
in 1943. In 1898 a different means of recording was invented by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen
called the telegraphone. It was used primarily for dictation and produced mainly in limited numbers
by the American Telegraph Company, in competition with the more successful wax disc based recorders
the dictaphone and ediphone. Magnetic wire recorders were especially popular in the US after
World War II and into the 1950s before magnetic tape recorders became more affordable. Beginning
in 1925 integrated electronic microphones, signal amplifiers and recorders allowed
sound to be recorded electronically, and not just acoustically. Previously all players
were mechanical. Electric recordings could reproduce a broader range of sound as well as
creating the role of a sound engineer to capture, mix and otherwise improve recorded sound. Electric
players followed quickly in 1926. The Jazz Singer, the world's first talkie synchronized sound to the
picture by locking a turntable to the projector, and by the 1930s sound on film techniques were
developed which allowed sound to be physically recorded using light, often on the same film as
the images. The sound could be retransmitted as an electrical signal and played using loudspeakers.
It was Second World War era Germany which revolutionized sound recording next with their
invention of magnetic tape recording. Invented in 1928, and based on magnetic wire recording
first invented in 1898, it was restricted to Germany until the end of the war. Allied Nations
first learned about magnetic tape recording when they realized that pre-recorded German programs
had sound almost indistinguishable from live performance. Magnetic Tape replaced discs as the
primary medium for sound masters and allowed for longer and higher fidelity recordings. It also
allowed for multi-track recordings for music, it also allowed for significantly more editing
although most home playback remained on vinyl. Using tape for actual playback began in 1954
with the fidelipac, also known as a cart; they were mostly used for playing back short jingles,
commercials and some music on the radio. They used endless loop tape cartridges invented in 1952 by
Bernard Cousino. These developed into the Muntz Stereo-Pak or 4-track created by Earl ‘Madman’
Muntz in 1962 as a way to play music in cars, the tapes were considerably more manageable than
similar automobile record players like the Highway Hi-Fi and Auto-Com Flexidisk. The 1960s saw the
invention of two important new media for sound playback, the compact cassette and the eight
track. The cassette was invented by Lou Ottens and a team at the Dutch company Phillips in 1963.
Ottens had led the development of Phillips first tape recorder which led to his development of the
cassette. His team developed their own cassette instead of using the 1958 RCA tape cartridge
system. Contributing to its success was the fact that the format was licensed to Sony free of
charge. Though it actually predates the 8-Track, the cassette's greatest popularity wasn't until
the 1980s when it surpassed vinyl record sales, and the Sony Walkman defined portable music.
The 8-Track, whose development is the subject of another episode of the History Guy, was designed
by Richard Kraus at the Learjet Corporation adopted from the fidelipac. The 8-Tracks
initial success came from its use in cars, in 1965 Ford included 8-track players in
several models. Sales peaked in 1978 before declining rapidly. Digital recording began on
magnetic tape in the 1970s in formats like the digital audio tape and digital compact cassette,
neither of which were commercially successful. Optical disc technology was first commercially
released with the failed laser disc which served as the basis for a joint Sony Phillips effort
to develop the Compact Disc Digital Audio, a fully digital recording medium released
commercially in 1982. Ten years later CDs outsold cassette tapes. But even the relatively
small and easy to use compact disc was too much as the entire idea of physical media was being
challenged. The invention of the digital audio player is generally attributed to British
inventor Kane Kramer whose 1979 invention received a patent in the United Kingdom in 1985,
and in the US in 1987. While his invention would be important in later patent disputes the player
never went beyond a prototype. A breakthrough came in 1994 when the International Organization for
Standardization produced a draft technical report on the MP3 audio coding standard. Largely
developed by the German Fraunhofer Society, MP3 would become the standard file format for most
digital audio players. Portable digital players, essentially computer drives that stored digital
files, became commercially available in 1996. But early portable digital media players tended to
be clunky, hard to use, had limited storage and were expensive. In the year 2000 the Innovative
I2Go had 2 GB of memory and cost $2,000. But the market really changed with the introduction
of the Apple iPod in 2001 which offered 5 GB of storage and retailed for $400. Apple CEO Steve
Jobs said at the time you can fit your whole music library in your pocket. 600,000 were sold in the
first 14 months, in 2004 Apple sold 8.2 million of them. While portable phones with built-in MP3
players were available as early as the year 2000, the process of transferring songs was cumbersome
and portable MP3 players still ruled the market until the introduction of the Apple iPhone
in 2007. Sales of portable MP3 players peaked that year but like many devices their role was
absorbed into the growing smartphone market, and Apple ceased production of the iPod in
May of 2022 having sold 450 million of them. Today of course most music is purely digital,
new cars today usually don't even come with any kind of a physical media player with
iTunes and streaming services replacing physical recordings altogether. But at the same
time physical recordings are making a comeback, vinyl albums have had something of a Renaissance
lately with sales increasing progressively over the last 17 years, and sales of vinyl albums
outpacing the sale of CDs for the first time in 2022. It may be even more surprising,
new albums are sometimes being offered also in cassette format, I guess for people who
miss that cassette tape hiss. Or really just for people who want to have a physical music
collection in a smaller format. The argument isn't just over the purportedly warmer and
more natural sound of analog recording, but also that visual and tactile experience
that comes from owning a physical album. And in perhaps the most extraordinary example,
human recorded sound is now being carried, as of November 2023, more than 15 billion miles
away from Earth. Two identical golden records were included aboard the spaceships voyagers 1 and 2
intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them. They include greetings
in several languages, sounds from Earth such as birds, and wind, and music ranging from Mozart's
Magic Flute to Johnny B Goode by Chuck Berry. Today recorded music is more
accessible and omnipresent than ever before. What that means for the
future of recorded music is unclear, but I think we all can be sure that humans will
continue to record their voices for posterity. I hope you enjoyed watching this episode of the
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