The Birth of the Turntable

From phonautographs to the early record players, we take a look at the birth of the turntable as an entertainment device. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in tech with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm a producer host a
gad about town here at how Stuff Works, and I
love all things tech and we're going to continue our

(00:26):
series of listener requests about tech that relates back to music. Today,
I'm talking about a request from listener Gelert. Gellert wrote
in to ask that I do an episode about DJ technology.
Here's the thing, there's a ton to cover in DJ tech,
and I could have just done one sort of overview episode,

(00:49):
but I don't feel like that's really the spirit of
this show, and I don't think it just I don't
think it will do justice to Gellert's request, and I
don't think it really serves you guys well as lessners.
So instead, I'm gonna take my time and for this
particular episode, I'm going to focus on the origin of
one piece of technology used in DJ work, and that

(01:11):
would be the predecessor of the turntable. That's right, I'm
not even really talking about the turntable in this episode because,
as it turns out, no pun intended. I'm probably gonna
be saying turn a lot this episode, but trust me,
I'm not intending it to be kind of a pun.
But as it turns out, it's a very long and
rich history, and it's really interesting well before it ever

(01:35):
becomes what we would typically call a turntable or a
record player. So this is part one, and in part
two we will continue that story before moving on to
other listener requests that also have to do with music.
So a few years ago, I probably would have made
a joke, In fact, I know I would have made
the joke that most of you guys out there have

(01:56):
no idea what a turntable is because vinyl had gone
out of favor after a while, and really the only
people who were interested in vinyl were collectors and DJ's
and everyone else had kind of lost any connection to it.
But since then, vinyl has obviously experienced a renaissance. You've
got a lot more bands that are producing albums in vinyl,

(02:17):
You've got a lot more companies out there making equipment
to play vinyl. You've got a lot more people out
there interested in buying it. So heck, the Facebook friendship
anniversary videos that you get whenever it's your anniversary of
making friends with someone on Facebook that features a vinyl
album being placed on a turntable, so the references are
out there. So I'm gonna assume y'all know what a

(02:39):
turntable is. Now. In my neck of the woods, we
sometimes would call these record players, but you should know
record players and turntables are technically two different types of technology.
They're very similar. A record player has a turntable incorporated
into it, but you shouldn't just use the terms interchangeably,
like I am probably going to you, because old habits

(03:01):
die hard, y'all. So this is a really big story,
and like I said, this is part one of the
history of turntables and how they work. In our next episode,
we'll pick up where we left off today and uh
spoiler alert, that'll be just before World War Two, but
we're gonna go from its origins up to that point today,
and then maybe we'll start chatting in the next episode

(03:25):
about some of the features you'll find on modern turntable,
specifically the ones that professional d j z is because
they've got some metaphorical bells and whistles that you won't
find on your typical record player at home. Now, I
feel like I've talked a lot about the physics of
sound over the past few episodes, so I'm just gonna
hit the high points so that we have that foundation.

(03:46):
Sound is vibration, and we primarily hear sounds through these
vibrations affecting the tympanic membrane in our ears, which transfers
those vibrations to structures called cochlea inside our inner ear,
And inside the cochlea there's fluid that when it moves
due to these vibrations, it stimulates special nerve cells that

(04:09):
then send impulses to the brain, which interprets all of
that as sound. I think that's the most important bits
that I could hit. But remembering that sound is a
physical phenomena, it is vibration, that's the important part. When
it comes to the history of turntables and recorded sound. Now,
the idea of a device that could play back sound

(04:31):
dates back much further than our ability to achieve such
a goal. This what came as a big surprise to me.
So there was a great French novelist, seven Yen de
Siernald de Bejarac, who lived during the seventeen century. He
actually wrote about such a potential gadget not in a

(04:54):
way of or not as a means of making one like.
It wasn't a set of instructions, but rather just a
concept he had. And this is, by the way, the
person whom the play sierra No de Bergerac was based
upon it was a real person, and he actually did
have quite the shnaws on him. If you know the
story of Sierrano de Bergerac, you know he was regarded

(05:17):
as a man who was very gifted in language, a
wonderful poet, but also, and not to mention, a deadly duelist,
but also a guy who had a really big nose.
As it turns out, the real Sierrano de Bergerac was
all those things, but most of the other elements in
the famous play based off of his life are largely invented. Anyway,

(05:37):
sierra No wrote the following about a device he discovered.
Let's say, in a dream. He was dreaming about the
moon and possible inhabitants of the moon, and he in
this dream he encounters a box, and he says, when
I opened a box, I found something made of metal

(05:58):
somewhat like our locks, full of an endless number of
little springs and tiny machines. It was indeed a book,
but it was a miraculous one that had no pages
or printed letters. It was a book to be read
not with the eyes, but with ears. When anyone wants
to read, he winds up the machine with a large
number of keys of all kinds. Then he turns the

(06:20):
indicator to the chapter he wants to listen to. As
though from the mouth of a person or a musical instrument,
come all the distinct and different sounds that the upper
class moon beings used in their language. When I thought
about this marvelous way of making books, I was no
longer surprised that the young people of that country know
more at the age of sixteen or eighteen than the

(06:42):
graybeards of our world. They can read as soon as
they can talk, and are never at a loss for
reading material. In their rooms, on walks in town, during
voyages on foot, or on horseback, they can have thirty
books in their pockets or hanging on the pommels of
their saddles. They need only wind to spring to hear
one or more chapters, or a whole book, if they wish. Thus,

(07:06):
you always have with you all the great men, both
living and dead, who speak to you in their own voices. Now,
I think that's actually a remarkable dream when you think
about it, because what Siatrano de Bergerac is describing in
this fanciful description of a dream are are things that
we have today. The idea of having a device that's

(07:28):
able to play back for you and audio copy of
a book. I mean, we have entire businesses that are
built around making audio books available and then devices that
can play those, and so sierr No's just being fanciful,
but today we actually have that stuff. So this was
kind of amazing science fiction from this uh, this French

(07:50):
author back in hundreds of years ago. So it's a
charming dream, but as I said, it was a little
more than wishful thinking in sierr No's day. It would
take two more centuries before someone attempted a practical means
to convert sound into a recorded medium. And it was
in a peculiar but a clever way. Before there was

(08:11):
ever a phonograph or a grammophone, and certainly long before
there were turntables or record players, there was the phone autograph.
A nineteenth century French bookseller named Edward Leon Scott de
Martinville came up with the idea or Martin Villa, if
you prefer it, came up with this idea and it
was a pretty cool one. In the eighteen fifties. Eddie,

(08:34):
as I call him, was reflecting on the growing art
and science of photography, which was a very young technology
at that time. Photographs were able to capture moments in
still images, but what if you could capture sound in
a similar way and make a record of actual audible stimuli.
Scott created a design for a machine that would do

(08:56):
just that. It did not record sound directly to a
medium exactly, but rather made a record of sound upon
a visual format. He proposed mounting an acoustic trumpet over
a pane of glass that was coated in lamp black,
so sort of like a kind of like an ink.
The flared end of the trumpet would face the sounds

(09:18):
you wish to document, so it's almost like the business
end of a microphone. You would put the sound into
that side of it. The small end of the trumpet
had a very thin membrane stretched across it, so uh,
if it were a classical trumpet, the part that you
would blow in the mouthpiece that would have a little
membrane on it. Mounted on the center of this membrane,

(09:39):
facing away from the interior of the trumpet and toward
the pane of glass, would be a small needle made
from a flexible but stiff material such as boar's hair.
This needle would make very light contact with that pane
of glass, just enough so that if the needle would
move due to vibrations in the membrane, it would disturb

(10:01):
the lamp black. Vibrations in the membrane. Now, I feel
like singing a song, but I'm not gonna Scott proposed
moving the lamp black so that the needle would gently
drag across it, and then speaking into the trumpet, you
would create these vibrations and that would end up tracing
patterns on the lamp black. You would smear the lamp

(10:22):
black away and what would be left is a pattern
that would represent whatever the sound was that went into
the trumpet. So you would have a record of what
happened just dragged in this lamp black. Now, he didn't
intend for this device to have any useful ability to
play back sound. Instead, he thought it would create a

(10:42):
type of natural stenography that way of actually taking down dictation.
For example, it would be a visual record of the
noises that were present during the recording session, and perhaps
one day, with enough study, we would be able to
read the words that were spoken simply by looking at
the patterns that had been left behind in the lampblack. So,

(11:04):
in other words, you might say the same sound over
and over and over again while you use this machine,
you look for the pattern that's made from speaking that
sound while the machine is in use, and then you say,
all right, every time I see this particular shape in
this kind of glass, I know that it was that
sound that made this shape. That was kind of the

(11:26):
basis of his idea. As it turns out, this wasn't
that far fetched. In fact, it's now been done more
than a century later. In two thousand and eight, historians
were able to use optical imaging to scan phone autograph
cylinders and play back the sound. There's a great example
of one that recorded someone singing au Claire de la lune,
a French folks song. The sound file the historians generated

(11:50):
at first didn't sound anything like that. It didn't sound
recognizable at all, at least not to me. But they
built in some algorithms to clean stuff up, to adjust
the playback speed, to remove some harmonics to enhance some
other elements of it, and then once they were done,
it was unmistakably au Claire de la Loon. By eighteen
fifty nine, Scott partnered with a man named Rudolph Kinnig,

(12:13):
who specialized in building precise instrumentation. He was a machinist.
The two determined that one necessary requirement was a means
to have an accurate and precise measurement of the passing
of time in relation to the creation of a recording.
By using a tuning fork of a known pitch, the
two could determine the amount of time that passed during

(12:35):
any part of a recording. A tuning fork will always
vibrate at the same frequency. The specific frequency depends upon
the tuning forks. So if you have a tuning fork
with a fundamental frequency of the note A, it will
vibrate at four hundred forty times per second or four
hundred forty hurts. So if you have an a tuning
fork and you strike it and then you put that

(12:58):
next to one of these phonautographs as it's recording, you'll
get this very even pattern that's made from the vibration
of that needle. And if you count the repetition of
that pattern, essentially the wave that you're seeing. You should
be able to say, well, this this stretch represents one second,
because there are four hundred and forty of those repeated

(13:21):
patterns here, and we know that the tuning fork it
vibrates at four forty times per seconds. So by counting
those up and we get to four or forty, we say,
all right, that represents one second of recording time. And
according to the National Park Service website, Scott's original design
would move the glass pane across the needle at a
speed of about one meter per second, which is pretty

(13:44):
darn fast. Now. The reason I mentioned Scott's work is
to point out that many different people were thinking about
ways to preserve sound, whether in a format that could
be played back or some other method of notation, and
a few looked at Scott's work and began to wonder
if such a thing would be possible with the phonoten graph.
One such smarty pants was Alexander Graham Bell, who theorized

(14:07):
that if you could find a means to trace the
patterns created by the phonotograph and transmit vibrations to a membrane,
you could recreate the sound that originally was responsible for
the markings. In other words, if you reverse this process
where the patterns that are on the pane of glass
can transfer vibrations back to a needle, back to a membrane,

(14:30):
you should be able to replicate the sound that made
those patterns in the first place. But he couldn't quite
figure out how to do it, Plus he was kind
of busy with other stuff, like inventing the telephone. In
April eighteen seventy seven, a French poet named Charles Kroll
suggested a method he thought might just work. And this

(14:51):
is where I really marvel at how French poets were
so forward thinking and inventive. Anyway, Miss r Krow said
that if you could etch sound into a medium, such
as a disc of tempered steel, you could create an
apparatus that could use those etchings to recreate the original sound.
He called his proposed invention a paleophone. He filed a

(15:13):
paper on the subject with the French Academy of Science,
wherein more or less was forgotten about for a few months. Meanwhile,
another person was at work on this concept, and that
was the Wizard of Menlo Park himself, Thomas Edison now
a moment here. I think Edison gets an awful lot
of credit for this field, and it is good to

(15:35):
remind ourselves that he was not the only big thinker
out there. It's also important to acknowledge that Edison employed
a lot of people, and many of those people contributed
in very meaningful ways to the things that he had invented.
So we really should mention that a lot of Edison's
inventions were truly collaborative efforts, at least when it got

(15:55):
to the part of taking an idea and making it
a real thing. Now, that's not to take away from Edison.
He really was a remarkable innovator. He did come up
with these amazing ideas. But we do need to also
credit the other people who contributed, and they should get
some props for their work well. According to the story,
Edison first got the idea for what would become the

(16:18):
phonograph by accident. He had been working on a completely
different piece of technology that was designed to record incoming
Morse code messages from a telegraph machine. So his invention
consisted of paper that was wrapped around a rotating drum
and a stylus connected to the incoming telegraph messages would

(16:41):
move against the paper as the drum rotated, and it
would make indentations that would indicate the dots and dashes
from the Morse code. Edison told his buddy Edward H.
Johnson about it, and how when Edison rotated the drum
quickly and the stylists vibrated against those indentations that it
may it would create this sort of humming noise. And

(17:04):
Edison theorized that he could use a device like that
if he fitted it with a diaphragm as opposed to
having it connected to a telegraph machine, he might be
able to record sound directly to a physical medium and
play it back. The diaphragm would vibrate, the stylist would
move against the paper drum, and then if you spun
it again, like if you reset the needle at the top,

(17:26):
and you spun the drum again, then it would cause
that needle or that stylist to vibrate, transmit those vibrations
to the membrane, and then you would have the sound again.
Now he was doing this independently. He had not read
of Crow's work, so this was not him copying someone else.
He was just kind of theorizing to his buddy, and

(17:47):
he thought that's a neat idea. Well, Edward Johnson thought
it was way more than a neat idea. He actually
went and wrote to the journal Scientific American UH, which
published the letter that said Edison was working on a
quote speaking telegraph in the quote device. Now this put
a bunch of pressure on Edison. He was in a pickle.

(18:09):
He needed to either get to work on actually inventing
this thing he had sort of just been kind of
hypothesizing about to his friend, or risk facing a public
failure in in not doing so. So he began to
work in Earnest on creating a gadget capable of recording
sound to physical media. Edison created a design based on

(18:30):
his ideas and then sent that design to a machinist
in his employee named John Crucy. Crucy had worked for
the Singer Sewing Machine Company before Edison hired him away,
and he had impressed Edison with his astounding skill at
fabricating machine parts that could bring to life Edison's ideas.

(18:50):
The phonograph was no exception. With little more instruction from
Edison than build this, Crucy got to work fabricating the
pieces necessary to make the first phonograph prototype. The original
phonograph had a cylindrical drum upon which Edison would wrap
a sheet of tin foil. A needle would rest against

(19:11):
the tin foil, and when Edison would turn a crank,
the cylinder would rotate and the needle would move along
the length of the cylinder, slowly, creating a spiral groove
as it did so. The needle was connected to a
simple microphone's diaphragm, and by speaking very loudly into the microphone,
which was essentially a trumpet, Edison can make the diaphragm vibrate,

(19:32):
transmitting those vibrations to the needle, which would then create
indentations in the tin foil, so the needles path and
that spiral would vary according to those vibrations. On that
first try, Edison recorded a nursery rhyme Mary had a
little lamb. After turning the crank and speaking loudly into
the microphone, Edison stopped. He removed the needle from the cylinder.

(19:55):
He raised the cylinder back to its starting point, placed
a slightly different needle attachment against the tinfoil, which was
connected to a small loudspeaker, and then turned the crank
and the machine began to rotate the drum again, and
the most amazing thing happened, the machine reproduced Edison's words.

(20:15):
According to Edison, everyone was astonished that the device actually worked,
and Edison himself said he was always terrified by inventions
that worked the first time he tried them. Edison would
create several more phonographs in this way, most of which
were reserved for demonstration purposes. Those invention, while serviceable, had
some big drawbacks, and one of those was that it

(20:37):
was pretty fragile. Specifically, the tinfoil was really fragile. It
would rip easily after just a couple of playbacks, and
it would take some other innovative folks to come up
with an alternative to tinfoil to push the the invention
a little further. I'll talk about them in just a second,
but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.

(21:03):
Hey guys, it's Jonathan and before we jump into the
rest of this show, I just want to give a
quick shout out to a new podcast that's come out
from How Stuff Works, the soundtrack show hosted by David Collins,
and I just thought it was thematically linked to the
whole turntable idea. This is a show that's specifically about
movie scores and soundtracks and how they affect the way

(21:28):
we perceive the films, the life they have beyond films,
the inspiration and influences that went into the creation of
those soundtracks. This is my jam, guys. I love soundtracks.
So if you are really passionate about music in general
and movie music in particular, check it out. It's the
Soundtracks Show. You can find it on iTunes or wherever

(21:49):
you get your podcasts. And now back to the show. Alright.
So Edison's invention was met with enthusiasm, but others also
wondered how the design might be proved upon to get
a better quality of audio and more robust recordings that
could last longer than a couple of playbacks, and a
couple of scientists named Charles Sumner Tainter and chi Chester

(22:11):
Bell proposed an alternative. By the way to Jester. Bell
was a cousin of Alexander Graham Bell, and they both
worked for Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory. Alexander Graham Bell
got a ten thousand dollar grant as the inventor of
the telephone and he set up this volta laboratory using
that money. They said that instead of using a sheet

(22:33):
of tinfoil wrapped around the cylinder, they were going to
use a cylinder of cardboard that would be coded with wax.
Another difference between the two methods was that the wax
cylinder phonographs would etch or engrave patterns on the wax,
whereas the tin foil predecessors depended upon indentations in the
tin foil. So think of it as you know, as

(22:56):
as going left and right across a surface, as opposed
to in and out of it using more or less
pressure from a stylus. The cylinders, as I said, were
made of cardboard coated in wax. Uh. They had a
spring powered motor that in at least the later versions

(23:16):
of this methodology, they used a spring powered motor to
provide power to move the components, which meant you no
longer had to depend upon a hand crank to turn everything,
because if you're trying to keep a steady pace turning
a hand crank, chances are you're gonna slow down or
speed up at different parts. That's going to affect the
quality of the recording. They wanted to have a better

(23:37):
way of maintaining consistency, so they went with this spring motor.
Now you still had to wind up the motor. So
if you've ever seen any images of people winding up
gramophone very quickly and then allowing it to start to
turn and then using the needle, that's essentially what's happening here.
It's kind of like winding up the clockwork in a

(23:58):
clock This was aldd in more even and replicable recording
in playback sessions. The speed of those cylinders was faster
than what you would find with vinyl record players decades later.
That typical device would spin a cylinder at a hundred
twenty revolutions per minute. So why would you want to
go fast? Why not go slower? Why not record sound

(24:20):
at a slower rpm? The main reason was due to volume.
It turned out that if you turn these cylinders at
a slower rate, it would generate a much lower volume.
The amplitude of the sound would be lower, and it'd
be harder to hear. So you had to create a
faster speed, which would create stronger vibrations when the playback

(24:44):
needle is running across this groove in a wax cylinder,
and then that would result in the membrane vibrating more
and you would have greater amplitude or volume in the sound.
So it's really just a practical concern. It wasn't that
there any other reason, like any specific mechanical reason why
it had to be a hundred and twenty revolutions per minute.

(25:05):
It was all about why can we do that will
give us the best quality versus volume of sound, And
at the time, that was pretty much it. The largest
cylinders would you would allow you to record up to
about three minutes of continuous sound at that rotational speed,
although very few cylinders actually had a full three minutes

(25:26):
of sound. Most of them were closer to two minutes.
The wax would wear away or tear off after a
couple of dozen playbacks, so you were still limited and
how frequently you could listen to any given wax cylinder.
It was better than tinfoil, but it still would degrade
each time you listen, So really you would think about

(25:46):
every time you listen to one of these cylinders there
was wear and tear on that cylinder. You were effectively
decreasing the number of playbacks by one every time you
listen to it. And if you weren't gentle with them,
you could break them. Pieces of cylinder could break off,
and then you would lose that part of the recording,
So there still wasn't perfect. The Volta Lab fellas called

(26:08):
their invention the graphophone. Edison, who by this time had
moved on to work on other projects, namely the incandescent lightbulb,
heard of the graphaphone and decided that he would give
his phonograph idea another go. Originally, the Volta Labs came
to Edison and proposed a collaboration. Edison, being a little

(26:30):
more independently minded. If he wasn't in charge, he didn't
necessarily want to be part of it this side. Instead,
he would work on improving the phonograph on his own
rather than collaborate with other inventors. So he chose to
use cylinders made entirely out of wax instead of a
cardboard cylinder with wax coding. This way, after the play

(26:54):
surface had degraded to a point where it was no
longer desirable, you could actually shave down the outside right
of the cylinder to create a new smooth recording surface,
so you could put a whole new recording on there.
The old recording would be lost because you shaved it,
but you would be able to put new stuff on
the old cylinder, so you could reuse cylinders and make

(27:14):
them a little more useful. A typical cylinder was four
point to five inches long, which is about ten point
eight centimeters, and it was two point one eight seven
five inches in diameter, or about five point six centimeters.
Those cylinders were the ones that could hold about two
minutes worth of stuff on them. In eighteen nine nine,
Edison introduced a model of the phonograph that could play

(27:37):
cylinders that were the same length as in They were
still four point to five inches long, but now they
were thicker. They were five inches in diameter that's about
twelve point seven centimeters. They could hold more recorded material,
but they were also more expensive, as was the special
phonograph that could play these cylinders, and because of that expense,

(27:58):
not a whole lot of bought them. Not a whole
lot of people or businesses bought them. It's just prohibitively expensive.
Edison's cylinders were made of a combination of bees wax,
sterec acid, and saracen now sterec or steric wax I
guess i should say, combines steric acid, which is a

(28:19):
fatty acid from vegetable oil or from tallow which is
from animal fat. And the steric acid helps hold waxes shape,
so you would combine it with wax, and that allows
it when it hardens to maintain its relative shape. It
doesn't lose that over time, because you could think of
wax is sort of like a very very viscous fluid.
Saracen is a paraffin wax, that means it's a petroleum product.

(28:43):
So you would take that and combine that with the
bees wax, which was clearly wax from bees, and the
ysteric wax, and that's what Asen used to make his
cylinders that were better suited for phonographs. People began to
call cylinders with recordings on them reck kords, So originally
records in the sense of audio meant these wax cylinders,

(29:07):
not the discs that we associate with the word today.
So you would have a record and it would be
a wax cylinder. The various models of graphophones and phonographs
had different output devices. Some graphophones, the earlier ones had
sort of stethoscope like hearing attachments, so you would plug
these directly into your ears. They would have a tube

(29:27):
that would go straight to the graphophone and the sounds
would travel through the tubes to your ears. They were
kind of like old timey predecessors to today's earbuds others.
The later models would use a trumpet, a sound trumpet
through which sound would emerge. Phonographs were very similar. These
devices used acoustics to amplify sound as best they could,

(29:52):
and in an upcoming episode, we'll talk more about the
invention of speakers and how that changed things dramatically. A
business and named Jesse H. Lippincott purchased an exclusive license
from the American Graphophone Company that was headed by the
Volta Lab Fellas. Then he acquired the Edison Phonograph Company

(30:12):
from Edison, so he essentially had acquired one company and
gotten the exclusive license from that company's competitor, which many
had a united front and the two companies could share
best practices across each other. He would go on to
purchase other companies in a similar fashion and created the
North American Phonograph Company in eight Lippincott thought that the

(30:35):
technologies only real application at that time was for business,
essentially for taking dictation, but he encountered some resistance, specifically
from stenographers. They did not like the idea of being
pushed out of a job by a machine, which is
a familiar story throughout all of the Industrial Revolution and
leading up to even today. Automation is still a big

(30:58):
topic when it comes to the impact on the job market. Well,
the same was true in the eighteen eighties, and business
wasn't great for this new company. Within a couple of years,
Lippincott was struggling and his health was failing as well.
So Edison, who had been a lender to Lippincott the
majority lender, uh ended up assuming control of the company,

(31:21):
and by e two he had increased the appeal of
cylinders by branching into entertainment. He wasn't just producing business machines,
but he would record people playing musical instruments, or singing
an aria from an opera, or delivering a comedic monologue,
and so he was really kind of pushing the phonograph

(31:42):
as an entertainment device as well as a business device.
He didn't abandon business, he just added to it. His
cylinders became known as brown wax, which is kind of
funny because that was not always the actual color of
the cylinders, but it did end up sticking. From here,
things get a bit more business ee rather than technological.
Edison would declare bankruptcy for the phonograph company. That gave

(32:06):
him the opportunity to buy back the rights to the
phonograph itself, the technology, and he did that in eight
It took two years for this bankruptcy business to work
its way through the entire process, so he wasn't allowed
to sell phonographs until that concluded, which meant from eight

(32:28):
he continued working on developing the phonograph and improving the technology,
but he couldn't actually sell any of them. In eighteen six,
he was making phonographs for home users. Before, phonographs had
either been business equipment or they had been restricted to
places like bars or penny arcades as sort of a
novelty entertainment system. You can think of them as sort
of a proto juke box, so people could go and

(32:52):
listen to music. They put like a nickel in the
machine and then it would play for them a little song,
but you wouldn't own one in your own home at
that point. Now Edison was trying to change that. He
was trying to create a home market for this technology,
so he's bringing recorded music into the home, at least
a home that could afford such a luxury. Mass manufacturing

(33:12):
helped make this possible. In the early eighteen nineties, a
phonograph would set you back a hundred fifty dollars now
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index,
that would be equivalent to about three thousand, nine hundred
dollars today for a phonograph that could play two minute
long recordings on wax cylinders. By the late eighteen nineties,

(33:36):
so one decade later, Edison had brought that price down
on the standard phonograph to twenty dollars. That would be
about the same as five hundred sixty three dollars in
today's money. Or you could go bargain bin shopping and
you could buy a model that they offered that was
called the gem G E M. This one cost the

(33:57):
bargain basement price of seven dollars fifty cents. Now in
that amount was still pretty considerable. If we convert that
for today's money, you're talking about two eleven dollars, so
still pretty expensive, but more in the realm of affordability.
For at least a larger portion of potential customers. The cylinders,

(34:17):
by the way, cost about fifty cents each. That would
be about fourteen dollars in today's money. Now keep in
mind this was for a cylinder that could hold two
or maybe three minutes of material, So it's kind of
like buying a single from a musical artist for fourteen bucks.
And those larger cylinders I mentioned earlier, if you wanted
to get one that could hold more information on it,

(34:39):
that would set you back uh about four dollars per cylinders.
So if we adjust that for inflation, you're talking a
hundred and thirteen dollars per cylinder. Now keep in mind
those are reusable. Once you wear out the recording that
was imprinted on the cylinder, you could have it shaved
down and you could record something new on it, but

(35:00):
you would still lose the first recording that was on there.
So it's a tough cell. Now. The wax cylinders were
expensive relatively because even though they were made out of
inexpensive materials, wax was not hard to come by. They
weren't easy to mass produce. You could mass produce them eventually,

(35:22):
but it was never an easy process. In fact, Edison
didn't hit upon a mass production method for his cylinders
until nineteen o one. Previously, every single cylinder went through
an engraving process to have a recording set on that cylinder.
The new method involved using a mold rather than engraving.

(35:43):
It also meant the cylinders were made of a harder wax.
So first you would create a master mold using gold
electrodes to carve away the bits that don't represent sound.
This was called a gold mold. You would then pour
this into or cast it as a mold. You would
pour wax into the mold, and you allow the mold

(36:05):
to harden or the wax to harden within the mold. Rather,
a single mold could create up to a hundred fifty
cylinders every day. Well, that made it possible to bring
the price for the cylinders down to about thirty five
cents per cylinder in nineteen o four, which would be
about six dollars and sixty cents in today's cash, so
a little more reasonable. Uh. Before that, though, it was

(36:27):
just a painstaking process which kept the price high. While
all this was going on, the competitor to the cylinder
was gaining popularity, and that would be the disc format,
which eventually would evolve into the vinyl records we know
and love today. But in their earliest days, there was
no guarantee that they would win out in the format wars.
We can trace the history of the record disc to

(36:50):
its birth on November eight seven. That's when Emil Berliner,
a German who had moved to Washington, d C. Patented
his own system for sound recording. Berliner has got a
really fascinating past. He had originally worked for a dry
goods store when he immigrated to the United States and
began living in Washington, d C. Later, he took on

(37:13):
a job as a laboratory cleaning staff member for Constantine Falberg.
Fallberg was the man who discovered and named the compound saccharin.
While working for Fallberg, Berlinard became interested in the idea
of experimentation and innovation. Berlinar would go on to work
for the American Bell Telephone Company. He even invented a

(37:34):
loose contact telephone transmitter, which I think is quite a
leap from a laboratory janitor, and by eighteen eighties six
he started thinking about a device that would evolve into
what we now call the gramophone. While Edison and the
Volta Boys were working with wax cylinders. Berlinnard proposed the

(37:54):
flat disc as an alternative medium for sound recording. His
original discs were made of glass, and he actually used
a method similar to Scott's fanatograph, tracing a pattern onto
glass and then using a process called photo engraving to
transfer those traced patterns onto a sturdier disc. This was

(38:15):
in fact the methodology that Miss R. Charles Crow had
suggested back in eighteen seventy seven, but Berlinard was not
aware of Crow's work, so he came to the solution independently.
So you've got both Edison and now you've got uh,
you've got Berliner, both coming up with similar ideas based
upon something that someone else had had thought of, well

(38:38):
not based upon it, but similar to what someone else
had thought of a decade earlier. And it's just kind
of remarkable how these ideas were independently arrived at. So
Crow himself had never built a working device to bring
his idea to life. Berliner actually took that step, and
the photo engraving process is pretty cool. I'll give you
a quick overview first. What you would do is you

(39:00):
take the material you plan to engrave, and you code
it with a light sensitive photo resist chemical. So it's
a chemical that when you expose that stuff to light
will harden material. So you take the glass with the
patterns traced on them, and you would use that as
a mask against this blank disk of material. The material

(39:24):
you're playing on engraving, the blacked out part on your
glass disc, the part where the needle did not touch,
that becomes a shield. It shields the light from hitting
your blank disc. But the part where the needle traced
is a little clear section and light can pass through
that and hit the material underneath. So you expose this

(39:48):
combination to light. Typically these days we would use very
powerful ultra violet light, and the light moves through those
those patterns that the needle made on the lamp black
and it then hardens that chemically treated material. Then you
would use a special type of acid to dissolve some
of the non hardened material. You end up with raised

(40:09):
portions that represent the etchings that were on your glass master.
You can then use that to create a mold and
then you can start creating copies. But this method did
not produce commercially viable results. Berliner realized that he was
gonna need some other methodology to make stuff that was
gonna be good enough to sell. So he then switched

(40:31):
to a zinc disc and etching process that involved coding
the zinc with a mixture of bees wax and cold gasoline.
Believe it or not, he used a stylus attached to
a diaphragm to etch the recorded sounds onto the coding.
So again, you would make sounds into a trumpet. Those
sounds would travel down the length of the trumpet, make

(40:52):
a tiny membrane vibrate, and on the other end of
the vibrante the vibrating membrane was a stylus that would
rest against this coding and cause etchings to happen in it.
He would actually coat the blank side of the disc
with varnish. Now remember at this point records were one sided.
They did not have grooves on both sides. One side

(41:15):
was was completely smooth, and one side would have a
recording on it. So the varnish would protect the blank
side from what happens next, which was an acid bath.
The acid would etch the lines made by the stylus
into the grooves of the record. The rest of the
disc would be still coated in bees wax mixture on
that one side and varnish on the other, and thus

(41:36):
they would remain unaffected by the acid. They would have
this protective layer on top of them, so the result
was a playable record. Unlike the wax cylinder devices which
could be used to record or play back a cylinder,
Berliner's method required two separate devices, one for recording and
one for playback. The playback one was the gramophone, which

(41:58):
had its own playback needle. The needle was attached to
the speaker or trumpet of the gramophone via an arm,
So you have an arm on the end of which
is a needle. The other end of the arm moves
into this trumpet. When you put the needle against one
of these discs and it's rotating, the etchings on the
disc would cause the needle to vibrate. The needle would

(42:20):
transmit those vibrations through the arm of the device to
a membrane connected to the trumpet, and then sound would
emit from the trumpet and you would hear the playback.
Berlinar would phase the zinc disks out in favor of
vulcanized rubber disks, and then later on for discs that
were essentially plastic. The discs had two big advantages over cylinders.

(42:43):
They held together better for repeat playings, and they could
easily be mass produced through pressings. You'd create a master
recording on a special disc, you would make molds of
that master recording, and then you would use blank discs
and put those into the molds to create copies. So
you could do this relatively quickly, especially compared to wax cylinders.

(43:05):
Berliner built a prototype gramophone in eight and he demonstrated
it at the Franklin Institute. The record he demonstrated was
a seven inch disc, meaning it measured about eighteen centimeters
across its diameter, and again it only had a recording
on one side. The other side was smooth. The gramophone
he used at that time was still a hand crank device.

(43:28):
He had not yet worked with a machinist to create
the spring motor version, and it was designed to rotate
the disc thirty times per minute. That would end up
changing as well, because again like the wax cylinders, these
slower rotations meant that you had lower volume. As a result,
the desk had a limit of about two minutes of

(43:50):
recording on it. In that prototype. So you might ask
yourself what was on that first disk during the demonstration, Well,
it was it's hipped to be square by Huey Lewis
and the News, which was a remarkable achievement because Huey
Lewis wouldn't be born for another sixty two years. I'm kidding.
I don't know what was on the disk. It was

(44:11):
likely some sort of spoken word presentation. But I couldn't
find an account of what was actually recorded on this
demonstration disk. So if you happen to know what Emil
Berliner recorded on his demonstration disc for the Franklin Institute,
make sure you send me a message, because I couldn't
find it. But he did make a deal with a
German company called Camera and Reinhardt to produce a toy

(44:35):
version of his invention for hand turned gramophone players. The
company produced small runs of the device and disks, but
it was really nothing more than a novelty at that point.
So how did the gramophone find commercial success beyond that
small market in Germany? And what did it have to
do with the phonograph And how did this combined technology

(45:00):
nearly die before it's time? Well, I'll answer all those
questions in the next section, but first let's take another
quick break to thank our sponsor. By Berliner was ready
to take the next big step. First, he got some

(45:21):
investment money from some New York backers and created the
American Gramophone Company. This venture was a bit premature, and
it failed to make any real progress. In fact, for
a long time it was just lost to obscurity. No
one even remembered it was a thing. It resurfaced only
in the nineteen nineties when a researcher named Raymond wild
rediscovered evidence for it. But that failure did not stop Berliner.

(45:45):
He then created the United States Gramophone Company, and his
goal was to create commercial disc players for the average person.
The first discs he tried to market were made from
vulcanized rubber. A few of them were made out of celluloid,
but that did not hold up very well, and by
He then began to switch to a version that was

(46:08):
made out of shellac compound to create the discs. It
was harder, uh it was easier to work with in
the vulcanized rubber. It's around this time that a machinist
named Eldredge Johnson improved upon Berliner's design by adding that
spring motor I had mentioned earlier to drive the turntable.
That removed the necessity to hand crank the device, although
you still had to wind up the motor. The commercial

(46:30):
discs were meant to be played back at a speed
of between sixty and seventy five repetitions per minute, with
seventy being the most common speed. This kept the seven
inch disks to about two minutes of music. Now, how
could those speeds, which were faster, more than twice as
fast than Berliner's prototype, hold that same amount of music

(46:50):
as the prototype. Shouldn't they be able to hold less
than that? If? If they're if they're traveling faster than
the needle goes through the spiral faster? Right? What was?
Because Berliner had refined the method of creating the spiral
path on the discs, he was able to make those
spirals tighter and maximize the amount of information he could
store on a single side of a seven inch disc.

(47:11):
So why those higher speeds? While I mentioned that the
higher speed would produce more intense vibrations in the playback needle,
which increased the amplitude of the sound wave, so again
that was driven by necessity. There was no electronic amplification,
so you had to rely upon physics just basic vibrations
to create the sound, and you weren't really able to

(47:32):
turn up the volume, so you had a consistent limitation
on the amount of information you could put on a
disk because the needle would travel the full length of
the spiral groove in the disk in about two minutes.
So how did the disk went out over the wax cylinder,
which had already been on the market for a while.
Several advantages helped seal the deal. First, wax cylinders were

(47:55):
still pretty fragile. They would break after a few dozen playbacks.
Typically that meant that you had to start all over again.
You could create a new recording, but your old one
was gone. They were also harder to store. The wax
cylinders were more difficult to store safely. They took up
more space, and you would have to put them in boxes,
perhaps with additional protection around each cylinder if you wanted

(48:18):
to make sure you weren't damaging them between playthroughs. There
was no easy way to label the cylinders on the
actual wax cylinder itself, which meant if you lost a label,
like if you had a little container that the cylinder
would sit in and somehow you lost the container. You
would have no idea what was actually on that cylinder,
and the only way to find out would be to
insert it into a machine and started up to hear

(48:41):
what was on there. And just that act would reduce
the number of times you could listen to the wax
cylinder because you're putting wear and tear on it. So
cylinders were also more expensive because again they were harder
to mass produce. In contrast, record desks were easy to store.
You could up a label on each one, or you

(49:01):
could stamp a label on each one at the center
to indicate what was on the record, so you knew
immediately whatever was recorded on the thing. They were easy
to mass produce, which brought down the price and made
it more economical than wax cylinders, and the early record
discs were made out of pretty strong stuff, meaning they
weren't likely to be damaged and they could withstand far

(49:23):
more play throughs than a wax cylinder. Two other big
elements helped make the gramophone and more importantly, the record
disc a success. One was that Berliner wasn't just a
keen inventor. He was a pretty astute businessman. In those
early days, he had his United States Grammophone Company in
d C. But he also licensed his designs to a

(49:45):
group of entrepreneurs in Pennsylvania and they founded the Berliner
Grammophone Company of Philadelphia. That group, in turn hired a
man named Frank C. Man ce Man created the National
Gramophone Company in New York. Now, manufacturing for the players
mainly took place in d C and also a little
bit in Philadelphia, as did the disc production. But these

(50:09):
regional companies sort of acted as distributors for Berliner's technology,
so there was no real easy way to get these
inventions to other markets otherwise. Right, It's not like there
were vast networks of stores that you could send these two.
This is still in the days where the department store

(50:30):
was starting to take form, but it was still pretty rare.
You had a lot of dry goods stores and little
tiny shops, so it was hard to get a national presence,
and this was one way of doing it, was to
create various companies that all would work together. By the
late eight nineties, uh, the gramophone extended beyond the United States.

(50:53):
The another trend that was helping drive that demand, So
you had other countries suddenly saying hey, we want gramophones too,
and that helped the economic output of this particular industry.
But there was another thing that was a really important
element that made the gramophone popular, and that was industrialization.

(51:16):
With industrialization, people began to have more free time during
a day because they used to have to work a
full day. What what would be spent in labor all
day long could now be spent, at least in part
in leisure. You didn't have as many working hours because
machines took a lot of the load off of you,
so you didn't necessarily return home after twelve hours of

(51:38):
work and then you ate something and then you collapsed
in bed. Now you actually had a few extra hours
to fill, and that created a demand for a whole
new industry, the entertainment business. Gramophones met this demand allowed
people to enjoy music or comedy, or even lectures if
they wanted to, in their own homes, although in very
short bursts because you were limited to about two minutes

(52:02):
of recorded stuff per disk. Berliner's businesses went on to
face copycats, two of which the company was able to
shut down through legal moves, but the third, the Zona phone,
represented a bit of a betrayal. Two executives who had
been working at the National Gramophone Corporation, including Frank Cman,

(52:22):
became executives of a competitor company called Universal Talking Machine Company,
and they were still working for the National Gramophone Corporation.
So the Berliner Company in Philadelphia took issue with this.
They said, this is a conflict of interest. But the
whole mess eventually went to the courts, and the court
ultimately passed an injunction on the Berliner Gramophone Company that

(52:47):
effectively shut them down. Berliner himself decided he wanted to
get out of this cutthroat business and work on other things,
so he eventually passed his patent rights on to the
machinist Eldrich R. Johnson, that's the guy who created the
spring motor for the early grammophone. Johnson would then go

(53:07):
take the remains of the Berlinard Gramophone Company of Philadelphia
and create a new company called the Victor Talking Machine
Company Victor for short. Victor would become the biggest and
most famous record company in the world. Over time. In
the United States, people began to use the term phonograph

(53:30):
or phonogram to refer to gramophones, the gramophone name itself
began to fade from memory. In the United States and
other countries, people still used gramophone to describe the disc
based record machines, but in the US the gramophones old
rival became the generic term for playback machines. However, the
gramophone did lend its name to an award. The Grammys

(53:52):
take their name from the Gramophone. One other thing Berlinard
did that made a literal stamp on the record industry
was the c ation of a registered trademark. While he
was in London, Berlinard saw a painting that showed a
small terrier sitting in front of a gramophone. The terrier's
head is cocked a little bit to the side as
it appears to listen to whatever was coming out of

(54:13):
the gramophones trumpet. An English artist named Francis Barraud had
painted this portrait, and he used his own dog, Nipper
in the model. Berliner purchased a copy of this painting,
brought it back over to the United States, and immediately
applied to create a registered trademark for the image. Now,

(54:35):
by the time he was granted this trademark, it was
too late because the Berliner Gramophone Company of Philadelphia had
the injunction against it, but he went on and passed
the trademark on to Eldridge Johnson. So Eldridge Johnson made
it the image for the Victor Record Company and they
used it from that point forward, and the trademark has

(54:56):
the well known name his Master's Voice. Oh and after
all that, Berliner went on to develop other technologies like
the helicopter, but that's a subject for another show. In
Berliner's method was given additional credence because the Edison Company
began to produce disc players and the Edison disc record

(55:17):
At that stage, the records were still pretty short, their
price had dropped, but something else was emerging that would
nearly eliminate the market for the record player for the
home consumer and also record discs for the home consumer.
That's something that nearly wiped out the whole industry was radio. Now.
I've talked about the history of radio before, about how

(55:37):
people like Nicola, Tesla, and Marconi were instrumental in getting
the technology out of the laboratory and into the real world.
The Tesla Marconi story is another one filled with drama,
as Tesla was originally granted patents in the US regarding
radio in advance of Marconi, but then the Patent Office
would eventually overturn Tesla's patents in faye for for the

(56:00):
better connected Marconi's submissions. But we're not going to get
into that story here. It is good to point out
that Marconi's first demonstration of a wireless communications device took
place on December twelfth, eighteen nine six. He used radio
waves to send a signal across a room. Five years
later he'd repeat that demonstration on a much grander scale

(56:21):
by sending a radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean. But
at that stage radio wasn't something the common person would
ever have any experience with. The foundation for commercial radio
was laid in nineteen o six on Christmas Eve, when
Reginald Fastender sent a voice transmission across radio to wireless

(56:42):
operators on board ships off the coast of New England.
Up to that point, the only signals that had been
sent via radio were the beeps of Morse code messages.
Voice transmission created an entirely new opportunity. For the next
decade and a half, radio was used for commerce and
for experimental purposes, and some average citizens got to play

(57:04):
with radio they became amateur radio operators HAM operators. When
World War One broke out, it suddenly became very important
to be able to produce radios in support of military efforts.
So governments began to build out enormous manufacturing facilities or
fund manufacturing facilities. Those all began staff by people. They

(57:27):
learned how to make radios. They began to churn radios
out for the military. But after the war was over,
it meant that you had the building blocks for a
brand new industry just waiting to happen. They could produce
radios for the average citizen. In nine Dr Frank Conrad,
who was an amateur radio enthusiast in Pittsburgh, had started

(57:48):
to take to playing records over the radio for the
entertainment of his fellow hobbyists. He got a message from
the company Westinghouse. Now Westinghouse was in the business of
making radios, and they wanted to nurture this potential new
business of consumer radios. Together, Conrad and Westinghouse created the
world's first commercial broadcast radio station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They

(58:13):
received the designation k d k A, and it started
broadcasting on November two, nineteen twenty, which was election Day
in the United States. They chose that day because they
figured they could actually broadcast the election results to listeners
and beat out all the newspapers by spreading the word early,
and that would cement how important the consumer radio would

(58:36):
be as a viable product. It worked, and soon the
radio became an incredibly popular piece of home entertainment technology.
The radio gave listeners a chance to tune into totally
different stations and get lots of different types of programming.
Some of those stations would play music off of records. Well,
that removed the necessity to have a home record player.

(58:58):
There was no reason to have a phonogram in your
house because you could just turn on the radio and
listen to music that way for free. You purchased the radio,
and once you've done that, you have access to all
sorts of music, whereas if you bought a phonogram, you
would still have to go out and buy the individual
disks to listen to any sort of music. So a
lot of people said, well, why do I want to
do that? There's no reason, I'll just I'll just get

(59:19):
my music now. If this sounds familiar, you might think, wait,
that sounds a lot like the way music is today,
whether you go out and you buy a digital album,
or you even buy a CD or vinyl album, or
you just stream music using a popular streaming service, similar
to what was happening in the nineteen twenties. It was

(59:41):
a time where people said, well, I could go and
purchase all that music, or I can just listen to
stuff over the radio. Now, granted it wasn't on demand
like it is today with streaming. You were stuck with
whatever the DJs would play for you, but same basic principle.
The photograph industry faced a sharp decline once radio caught on,

(01:00:04):
and it did not take long for radio to catch on.
By nineteen twenty four, just four years after the first
commercial radio station, there were more than six hundred commercial
radio stations across the United States. So how did the
phonogram make a return to popularity How did it become
a home entertainment system again after the rise of radio.

(01:00:26):
How did it avoid the fate of becoming a device
just used by radio stations and no one else. We'll
explore that in our next episode, So look forward to
the next episode where we continue the story of the
evolution of the turntable, how it became a staple piece
of electronics in homes for many decades, how it then
faded from popularity, and how it returned, as well as

(01:00:49):
what the heck do all those do hickeys on a
DJ's turntable? What do they do and how do they work?
We're gonna cover all that in our next episode. I
hope you guys enjoyed this one. If you have suggestions
for future episodes, I'm doing a whole bunch of shows
based off listener suggestions. I would love to see more
of them. Send me an email. The addresses tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop

(01:01:12):
me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of
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You'll see the schedule there. I hope to see you
over there in the chat room. I love to see

(01:01:34):
listeners join in conversations over there. There are a lot
of fun and I'll talk to you again really soon.
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