He eventually sold a version of his device which automatically transcribed telegraph signals.īy the 1850s, telegraph wires were sending messages across whole continents. But the scientist never even thought of using the device to recreate the sounds he captured, even though all he would have had to do is use wax- instead of soot-covered paper and run his machine backwards. It contained the essentials of a record player: a hearing-horn focusing the sound onto a vibrating diaphragm (precursor to microphones), and a rigid pig’s hair sketching the diaphragm’s vibration onto a soot-covered paper cylinder.

In the 1850’s, scientist Leon Scott de Martinville did construct a device, the Phonautograph, which graphed out sound much as a seismograph records earthquake vibrations. And few (if any) writers before the telephone speculated that sounds would end up being captured just as photography (an 1820s invention) captured sights. However, there was never even the notion that music boxes could someday record or reproduced sounds– they just made them.īefore the telephone was invented, no one would have imagined hearing disembodied human voices. Also like record players, some music boxes allowed you to change the cylinder or disk so that you could hear a different tune. As the cylinder or disk turned, its bumps plunked a melody from resonant pieces of metal placed next to them-not that different from a record needle vibrating on a record. On music boxes, the information was stored as pegs or bumps sticking out from the surface of a cylinder or flat disk. Like record players, music boxes had two basic elements: a surface with musical information on it, and an instrument that translated that information into sound. However, some aspects of music boxes may have inspired the inventors of records. Aside from also being pure novelties aimed at those who could afford them, there isn’t much of a connection between music-box manufacturers and early records. But it was during the great “mechanical age” that inventors and scientists focused on sound reproduction.īy the early 1800s, makers of ornate music boxes that did brisk business with the upper classes. There is some evidence to suggest that as far back as the 1200s, the famously inventive English philosopher Friar Roger Bacon managed to crudely record a few words, and similar accounts of ancient novelty inventions exist. The history of the sound recording and the record industry stretches back to the mid-1800s, when methods of capturing sound were first devised.

The Evolution of the Sound Recording Industry

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