The evolution of Edison's phonograph.

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The Evolution of Edison’s Phonograph

        After many failed attempts at producing a contraption that could record sound so as to be listened to afterwards, Thomas A. Edison, an inventor from Menlo Park, New Jersey, created the first working phonograph.  Before Edison invented a working sound recorder, Charles Cros, a French Scientist, had drawn up a plan very similar to Edison’s phonograph.  His experiment never went beyond the planning stage.  

        The main sound recording component of the phonograph was a metal cylinder wrapped with tinfoil.  Sound was recorded when someone spoke into the mouth piece causing a stylus to vibrate and make dents in the tinfoil.  To play the sound back, this process was simply reversed.  The stylus would be repositioned so that the stylus would be pushing into the grooves causing the same vibrations to occur.  These vibrations would be amplified and the sound would be reproduced.  This type of recording was flawed in many ways.  Probably the main reason people didn’t like it was because you could only make one recording at a time.  For example, if there were 60 copies of a song, sung by a woman, it means that this woman had to sit there and sing the song 60 times.  Also, the tinfoil would wear down after five or six plays.  Because of this, phonographs were not very popular.

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        In 1885, Chichester A. Bell and Charles S. Tainter invented the Graphophone.  With basically the same idea as Edison, these two Americans did what they believed perfected the sound recording system.  They used a cardboard cylinder coated in wax in place of the metal cylinder cover with tinfoil.  Many people like this at first because that wax could be shaved down and the cylinder could be used multiple times.  This too was flawed; the wax would dry and if hit too hard, would crack and be useless.

        In 1887, a German born American, Emile Berliner, invented the Gramophone.  This device ...

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