"Halloo! Halloo!" Thomas Edison was amazed to hear these words played back to him from a strip of paper pulled over a telephone diaphragm. He had been working in his new Melo Park, N.J., laboratory trying to improve the telephone of Alexander Graham Bell when he made his accidental discovery on July 18, 1877. He was aware of the earlier experiments by Leon Scott de Martinville with graphing paper and Herman Helmholtz with tuning forks, but no one had yet made a workable device to store and play back human speech. Edison followed his initial discovery by designing and patenting a device with a rigid stylus attached to a vibrating membrane to indent the tinfoil surface of a hand-cranked grooved cylinder. The vertical-cut indentations were a direct mechanical record of sound vibrations, "acoustic" rather than graphical. The cylinder phonograph built by Edison's assistant John Kruesi in December 1877 was the first practical device to record and playback speech and music. The press immediately praised the miracle of recorded sound and Edison proudly showed his invention to President Hayes in the White House.
It worked, but it did not sell. Although Edison considered the phonograph one of his most original inventions, he was unable in 1878 to improve its poor sound quality or mass produce the recordings. The cylinders that he called "phonograms" were standardized at 4 inches long and 2-1/4 inches in diameter, with 100 grooves per inch, but played for only about one minute and wore out quickly. The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company sold about 2000 machines and closed down production. In 1878 Edison shifted his attention to the light bulb and postponed working on his tinfoil machine for 8 years. During this period, two improved recording machines were introduced by other inventors. The graphophone patented in 1886 by Charles Tainter and Chichester Bell used a smaller 1-5/16-inch diameter cylinder coated with wax rather than tinfoil, making possible smaller hill-and-dale vertical cut grooves and a longer playing time of two minutes. The second machine was the gramophone of Emile Berliner that used a flat 5-inch wax-coated zinc disc rather than cylinders. His stylus moved laterally when cutting into the thin wax layer, not vertically, producing a zig-zag groove that produced louder volume during playback. Berliner was one of the first to predict in 1888 that prerecorded discs would soon be mass-produced for millions of machines playing music in the homes of consumers.
Edison returned to his phonograph in 1886 and produced an improved model with sapphire floating stylus cutting a hill-and-dale groove only 1/1000 inch deep in the cylinder of solid white wax. His 1888 Improved Phonograph replaced the hand crank with an electric motor that ran at 125 rpm. New 6-inch cylinders played for almost 2 minutes. He also developed a spectacle-shaped device that quickly switched the recorder and reproducer, a useful feature for business dictation that allowed a quick check on what had just been recorded. Jesse Lippincott bought the patent rights of the Edison and Graphophone companies in 1888 and founded the North American Phonograph Company to lease dictating machines to local distributors. The Edison Phonograph Works and the American Graphophone Company continued to manufacture machines for Lippincott. However, stenographers refused to use the machines and Lippincott's company failed by 1894. Edward D. Easton was a Graphophone investor who refused to sell his interests to Lippincott. Instead, he started the Columbia Phonograph Company in his sales district of the District of Columbia and Virginia. Yet Easton also faced technical problems of poor quality discs and lack of standardized parts among competing manufacturers. Most importantly, no national market for recorded music had developed.
Sound recording found its first widespread acceptance in the world of public entertainment. In 1889, Louis Glass of the Pacific Phonograph Company in San Francisco invented a mechanism to start the motor of an electric phonograph when a nickel was deposited into a slot. Within a year, he joined Felix Gottschalk to create the Automatic Phonograph Company to put the phonograph in all types of entertainment establishments, from saloons to ice cream parlors. The talking machine joined the mass leisure culture that emerged in the 1890's with Coney Island, professional baseball, vaudeville and movie theaters. The Columbia company became a leading producer of "entertainment cylinders" featuring John Philip Sousa's Marine Band and the whistling soloist John Y. Atlee. Singers were paid $5 to repeatedly record many 5-inch wax master cylinders because they wore out after 15-20 playings. Copies from masters were made one at a time by the pantograph method, connecting a playback machine with a rod from a recording machine. Columbia could make 350 copies per day and sold them by mail order for 50 cents each.
The coin-slot business energized the manufacturing companies. Easton's Columbia acquired the Tainter-Bell patents from Lippincott's failed company and introduced in 1894 a low-cost graphophone with a spring motor developed by Thomas H. Macdonald. For the first time, this graphophone could play the Edison standard cylinders and was priced for the masses. The competition between Edison and Macdonald for the new emerging home market was intense. Columbia focused its sales effort on big cities while Edison appealed more to rural buyers. Edison recovered his patent rights from Lippincott and organized the National Phonograph Company in 1896 to sell a $40 Home Phonograph, touted as the "machine for the millions." Emil Berliner finally developed a method to mass-produce his flat discs, stamping rubber copies from a hardened electroplated master that did not wear out like the wax masters. But the rubber discs warped and were poor quality. He hired Eldridge Johnson in 1896 to make a spring motor for his $25 Improved Gramophone, and to improve the duplication process. When Columbia lowered its price to $25, Edison improved his Home model's spring motor in 1897 to play 6 cylinders with one winding and lowered his price to $30.
Johnson used his patents and those of Berliner to create a new company in 1901, the Victor Talking Machine Company with the famous Nipper dog trademark. Within a year, Victor established a national network of 5000 sales outlets using existing music stores and retailers rather than Columbia's practice of selling through its own dealerships. Johnson launched an advertising campaign in the mass media to promote the gramophone as affordable to everyone. Visionary inventors like Johnson and Berliner, the coin-slot business, the low-cost spring motor player, the electroplate duplication method and aggressive marketing techniques were key factors in the growth of sound recording into a mass medium by the start of the new century.
Victor, National, and Columbia became the Big 3 manufacturing and record-producing companies that dominated the medium for the next 20 years. The Victor Company introduced the single-side 12-inch disc in 1903 that played for 3-1/2 minutes, and developed the Victrola player in 1906 with an internal horn and all parts concealed in a cabinet. This model was so successful that all phonographs were called "victrolas" and became part of the furniture of every respectable Victorian parlor. Edison's National Phonograph Company continued to make cylinders, mass-produced by the "gold-mould" electroplating process after 1902. Edison attained some of the highest quality recordings of the era with the celluloid blue Amberol models of 1912 that played for 4 minutes on the Amberola player with a floating diamond stylus.
The war between cylinders and discs started by Emile Berliner in 1888 was finally won by the disc 25 years later. The flat disc was easier to use and store, and Eldridge Johnson was a superior promoter. Victor and Columbia agreed to share patents in 1902 and Columbia stopped making cylinders in 1908. Edison finally conceded that the disc had won and introduced the Diamond Disc flat record and player in 1913. However, Edison was a stubborn perfectionist and refused to share his technology with the competition. His Amberola cylinders and Diamond Discs could only be played on Edison machines, while Victor and Columbia discs could be played on most disc phonograph players. Cylinders lived on as dictating machines. Edison produced the Ediphone after 1912, and Columbia sold off its dictation business in 1907 to the new Dictaphone Company that sold cylinder recorders into the 1950s.
When patents controlled by the Big 3 began to expire in 1914, a host of competitors entered the disc phonograph business. Most would not survive in a tight market controlled by the Big 3, but a few companies such as Aeolian and Brunswick would become important. The phonograph also expanded into Europe and Asia, creating a world market for American technology. Edison was the first to sell players in England in 1878, and his agent George E. Gourand promoted the phonograph and recorded in 1890 the voices of prominent figures such as Florence Nightingale and William Gladstone. A Handel Oratorio recorded by Gourand in London on June 29, 1888, is possibly the oldest surviving example of recorded music (listen in au or RealAudio from the Edison NHS Sound Collection). Edison machines were simple and portable, and were used for early field recordings. Berliner sent William Barry Owen to establish the Gramophone Company of Great Britain in 1897, selling under the HMV (His Master's Voice) label. Emil's brother Joseph Berliner built a record-pressing factory in Hanover, Germany, and established Deutsche Grammophon of Berlin in 1897. Victor opened branches in India and Australia by 1907 and created the Japanese Victor Company (JVC) that later was taken over by Matsushita. Fred Gaisberg was one of the most successful overseas agents for Victor, recording celebrities such as Enrico Caruso for Victor's Red Label discs.
Recording studios in Europe and the U.S. depended on the careful arrangement of instruments on different level platforms to direct music into long horns that carried the sound into a sealed room where a recording machine cut grooves in a soft wax master. In the 1890's, the limited range of the phonograph favored small orchestras with brass instruments. European engineers for Victor improved the process of studio recording to capture the subtle sounds of the softer orchestral instruments. Augustus Stroh in London developed the stroh-violin with a metal horn attached to a sound box on the side of the bridge to amplify the string sound into the main recording horn. By 1913, the recording medium had improved to permit the first recording of a complete orchestral symphony, Beethoven's Fifth by the Berlin Philharmonic. Louis Sterling in London, who took control of the English branch of Columbia in 1909, signed Thomas Beecham to record symphonies and was the first to record live musical stage revues in 1915. However, until the invention of microphones and amplifiers, sound recording in the acoustic era was tightly leashed to the needle and horn.
Despite the Great Depression that lasted throughout the 1930s, the phonograph market expanded. Louis Sterling's British Columbia became part of the giant EMI Ltd. in 1931. American Columbia and Brunswick became part of the American Record Co. until sold to CBS in 1939. RCA bought the Victor Company for $150 million and the Camden, N.J., manufacturing complex became one of the largest in the nation with 16 buildings and 10,000 employees. Building 13 had 160 manual record presses that operated until 1977 and made 75 million records per year. RCA introduced a low-cost player in 1934 called the Duo Jr. that attached to a radio set. Jack Kapp helped establish an American branch of British-owned Decca Records and offered current popular music for only 35 cents per record. Juke boxes continued to proliferate and consume half of the nation's record production.
The radio market expanded as well in the Depression, helped by electrical recording technology. A new style of singing became popular due in part to the sensitive condenser microphones. Bing Crosby held the mic close to his mouth a sang in a soft melodic tone that became known as the "crooner" style. Amplified music from radios and turntables filled dance halls across the country and helped create the "swing era" in the mid-1930s. Benny Goodman became one of Victor's most important recording stars in the 1930s. Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo" sold 1 million copies in 1941 and became the first official "gold" record on Billboard's new weekly list of the top-selling records. Black artists had been excluded from radio but Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington gained fame on records in the swing era.
Although the networks followed a policy of live broadcasting only, radio stations became dependent on electrically-produced professional "transcription" discs. RCA created the transcription disc in 1929 when it transcribed optical soundtracks made in its New York studio to 16-inch discs for use by radio stations. The Victorlac discs (made of a new durable plastic from Union Carbide called vinylite) were stamped from acetate-coated aluminum masters cut by electrical equipment. Transcriptions were used for commercials such as the Pepsi nickel-nickel ad, for distribution of serials such as the Lone Ranger, for location recording such as Herb Morrison's emotional account of the Hindenburg explosion in 1937. By 1938, 22% of radio broadcasting came from transcription discs. Radio remained restricted by the 5000 hz ceiling on AM frequency imposed by the FCC, and by the telephone lines that carried radio programs from studio to transmitter. Many people believed that radio sounded better than the 78 rpm records they played at home. This was true for the large number of homes that still had spring-wound acoustic Victrolas. Yet amplifiers, speakers and pickup cartridges had improved dramatically in the 1930s, laying the foundation for the revolution in high fidelity that followed World War II.
In the U.S., the microgroove LP revolutionized the record industry. CBS president William Paley spent $250,000 to finance a team of engineers at Columbia Records from 1939 to 1948. Bill Bachman developed a new disc cutter with heated stylus and automatic variable pitch control. Rene Snepvangers developed a lightweight variable reluctance pickup. Jim Hunter, who had developed Victorlac at RCA, worked on an improved vinylite stamping press at the Bridgeport factory. Ed Wallerstein, Ike Rodman, Vin Liebler, and Bill Savory worked on the final team under the general direction of Peter Goldmark. On June 20, 1948, the team gave its first public demostration of the 12-inch 33-1/3 rpm 23-minute vinylite LP record with a 1-mil groove over 1/2 mile in length at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Philco made the first player for the LP, and other manufacturers soon followed. But not RCA; instead, David Sarnoff started the "war of the speeds" by offering in 1949 the 7-inch 45 rpm microgroove Extended Play vinylite record. RCA would lose millions trying to promote its format as a serious classical music medium. By 1950 it gave up, adopted the LP for "serious" music and used the 45 for pop singles.
The tape recorder would also define the new era of high fidelity. From the Poulsen Telegraphone in Denmark came wire recorders developed in America by Semi Begun and Marvin Camras. From the wartime German Magnetophone would come improved American versions. John Mullin would have the greatest impact when he demonstrated his Magnetophon to Alexander Poniatoff of Ampex and to Bing Crosby in Hollywood in 1947. Within a year, Ampex began to supply the radio and film industry with its Model 200 tape recorder at $4000 each. Adrian Murphy brought a Magnetophon from Germany for the CBS/Columbia LP project. Columbia understood the value of the tape recorder and bought some of the first Ampex models to use for mastering the first LPs in 1948. Richard Ranger sold his Rangertone tape recorder to the Hollywood film studios in 1948 and helped John Orr develop a tape-coating machine for his Irish brand tape. The Magnecord PT-6 tape recorder was developed in 1948 by former Armour Research employees to be an inexpensive tape recorder for the home market. In a remarkably short time, the tape recorder replaced the disc recorder in music and film studios.
It also spearheaded the adoption of stereo. The elusive goal "binaural" sound had been pursued since the acoustic era, with double-horned gramophones and dual-track cylinders. Arthur Keller had successfully recorded Stowkoski's orchestra in stereo, cutting 2 tracks on a record in 2 separate bands, but the records could only be played on expensive experimental equipment at Bell Labs. The tape recorder provided a simpler method of binaural sound. Magnecord in 1949 modified a PT-6 to record in stereo, with an upper head recording the left channel and a lower head recording the right channel. In 1950, Bert Whyte used this machine to make experimental stereo recordings of musicians. Stokowski urged David Sarnoff to adopt stereo, and in 1954 RCA began the sale of prerecorded open-reel stereo tapes at $18.95 per reel. The Westrex division of Bell Labs proposed a stereo standard for LPs based on its Keller patent and it was accepted by the record industry in 1958. The FCC approved a standard for stereo FM transmission in 1961, providing an important outlet for promoting stereo records and tapes.
High fidelity technology broke the stranglehold of the major music companies that produced 75% of the top hits in 1954. Any small label could use a tape recorder to release a record at a cost of only 11 cents each. Sam Phillips started Sun Records in Memphis with two Ampex recorders and 2 Presto lathes. His release in 1954 of Sun No. 209 "That's All Right (Mama)" by a 19-year old truck driver named Elvis Presley launched the career of America's greatest rock'n'roll star. Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records searched the American South for the new sound that Billboard called "rhythm and blues' in 1949, and found performers such as Ray Charles. Hillbilly music became "country and western" and gave a new voice to women like Kitty Wells. By 1960 there were almost 3000 record labels in the U. S. and a growing breadth of musical styles. John Cage created "musique concrete" out of tape recording fragments; Charlie Parker improvised his Be Bop sound; Dick Jacobs replaced microphones with transducers directly on instruments to produce his "space-age bachelor pad" music.
The early years of high fidelity were full of opportunity for young entrepreneurs. New standards opened the door for new equipment. The postwar years were the beginning of the "Affluent Society" and suburbanites were eager to furnish new homes withe the latest technology. Saul Marantz was discharged from the Merchant Marines in 1945, taught himself how to build audio equipment and produced his Model 7 preamp (with control knobs) and the sleek Model 9 power amp (with only a single dial). Avery Fisher made his model S1 phonograph in 1946 from the best components, capable of reproducing a frequency response of 20-20,000 hz. Frank McIntosh sold his model 50W1 amplifier for $249.50 in 1947 with a chrome chassis and oversized transformers and offered to test any amp for free to show that his was better. Norman Pickering was on the cover of the first issue of Audio Engineering in 1947 with his new pickup cartridge that tracked at only 5 grams instead of the usual 30 grams. Rudy Bozak sold his first loudspeaker in 1949 and would become a frequent promoter at the annual Audio Fairs, where the term "hi-fi" came into common use. Sydney Harman in 1952 founded Harman Kardon and introduced the Festival D1000, the first commercial hi-fi receiver. Acoustic Research introduced in 1954 the high quality, low-cost AR-1 bookshelf loudspeaker that used the acoustic suspension principle developed by company co-founder Edgar Villchur, using air in the box instead of mechanical suspensions to control driver motion; co-founder Henry Kloss opened a manufacturing plant in Cambridge, MA, where Kloss had been making cabinets for the Baruch-Lang speaker. Other co-founders were Malcolm Low and J. Anton Hofmann, who later joined Kloss in selling their interest in AR to Villchur and founding KLH. Here Kloss would design the KLH Model Eleven, the first portable stereo hi-fi player that included acoustic-suspension speakers folded into the ends of a suitcase that held the record changer and transistor amplifier.
The transistor from Bell Labs made high fidelity smaller, portable, mobile, ubiquitous. It was first used in hearing aids and the Regency portable radio designed by Texas Instruments. The Sony company of Japan would put the transistor in televisions and tape recorders and quickly become a world leader in consumer entertainment. The Philips company in Holland was not thinking of entertainment when it introduced the compact cassette in 1963. The 1/8-inch tape at 1-7/8 ips was sold the next year in the U.S. with the Norelco Carry-Corder for $199 as a reusable dictation device, including one blank cassette. But a huge demand for blank tape by teenagers seeking to make their own recordings caused Philips to make the cassette available to everyone. The 8-track player developed by William Lear in 1966 would fall victim to the cassette's simple advantages of size and recordability. Ray Dolby designed a consumer version (Type B) of his professional (Type A) noise reduction circuit in 1967 for Henry Kloss and his Advent models. Philips allowed new tape formulations to be used in the cassette, including duPont's chromium dioxide tape in 1969 and TDK's cobalt Avilyn tape in 1973.
The cassette format became the basis of the videotape revolution in the 1970's. Sony introduced the 3/4-inch U-matic VCR in the U.S. in 1971, followed by the 1/2-inch Betamax in 1975. The rival VHS format from JVC would eventually emerge dominant, but Sony triumphed with the Walkman portable audio cassette player in 1979.
Bell Labs had patented a pulse code modulation for telephones in 1926 but lacked fast electronic devices to process this PCM code. The microprocessor developed by Intel in 1971 finally provided the speed and power to use digital encoding. Sony developed its own integrated circuits for the PCM-F1 audio processor that recorded the digital pulses on videotape. Moog and Roland developed music synthesizers with microchips, and helped create the "disco" sound that was popularized in the 1977 film "Saturday Night Fever." Nintendo in Japan began in 1977 to make computer games that stored the data, including synthesized sound effects, on chips inside a game cartridge that sold for around $40 but only cost a few dollars to manufacture.
Philips joined with Sony in 1979 to substitute a digital PCM code for the FM signal and develop a standard for the compact disc. It would be a thin silicon disc 120mm in diameter that used 16-bit encoding and a sampling frequency of 44,100 per second to produce a distortionless signal of 90 db. The maximum playing time would be 74 minutes, long enough to hold Beethoven's 9th Symphony. The Sony/Philips collaboration ended in 1981 and each company released its own products based on the 1980 standard. The CD was introduced in Europe and Japan in the fall of 1982.and in the U.S. in1983. The first CD pressing plant in the U.S. was opened in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1984.
Within one decade, digital sound replaced electrical and acoustic reproduction methods. The LP and 45 followed the cylinder and 78 into the "dead media" of history. Dolby introduced its AC-1 digital encoder for satellite and cable transmission in 1984, Pro Logic surround sound for consumer electronics in 1987, SR-D digital sound for motion pictures in 1991, and AC-3 for High Definition TV in 1993. Fiber optic lines from Corning Glass began replacing the copper cables that had carried telephone and radio signals for 50 years. By 1998, the Internet had become the fertile ground for creation of MPEG and MIDI and other new audio formats of the digital future.