A Brief History of Recording Sound

146 years ago, on December 6, 1877, a young Thomas Edison walked into the offices of Scientific American with a strange device. And turning a crank, he amazed everyone there with the recording. Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph? 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 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 a credit for the invention of sound recording with his introduction of the phonograph 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 Léon Scott du 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, du 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 to stylus, which would leave an impression on paper covered in lamp black or soot. On January 26, 1857, he applied for a patent on his device, which he received two months later on March 25 for what he called a phonatograph. Martinville built several prototypes with the help of instrument maker Rudolf Koenig and successfully produced numerous phonatograms 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 phonatogram. 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 phonatograph became a footnote, described as a curio. That was until 150 years later, when researchers from First Sounds rediscovered several of the phonatograms, 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 Eclair de la Lune. 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 Eclair de la Lune recording was made on April 9, 1860. Several earlier recordings have been recovered, but remain unintelligible. Numerous other sounds have been recovered from Martinville's 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 Scott's, 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 Crow, 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 30. Crow's most important thought was that the marks that a stylus made could be used to restore the original acoustic signal. Crow, however, never made any significant attempt at actually producing what he dubbed a paleophone. In 1877, Edison was actually working on telegraphs on the telephone. He was developing a machine, a telegraphic repeater, that could take telegraphic messages and record them on paper, which could then be re-sent over the telegraph at any speed. At high speeds, the tape made a noise, resembling human talk, heard indistinctly. It 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 it 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 tinfoil wrapped around a metal cylinder and conceived of a machine that had two diaphragm and needle units, one to record and the second to playback. Speaking into a mouthpiece, the stylus indents the tinfoil in a hill and dale pattern. The device was manually cranked to record and play back. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to an associate, Swiss-born machinist John Kruse, who quickly built a model. The first words Edison recorded were, Mary had a little lamb, and the device played them back. 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 12, 1877. However, there's evidence that it wasn't built until later. The earliest reporting on Edison's talking machine appear in May, and he officially announced his invention on November 21, 1877. He applied for a patent in December, which was granted on February 19, 1878. According to Scientific American, on December 6, 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 phonograph 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 tinfoil 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 phonograph, 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 dreamed 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 Tainter's, and he purchased the 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, which 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 phonographic 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 two minutes, though larger four-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, were first used in the 1930s in radio. Vinyl discs were used in World War II for popular B-discs, which provided music to U.S. soldiers, starting in 1943. In 1898, a different means of recording was invented by Danish engineer Waldemar Polson, called the telegraphone. It was used primarily for dictation, and produced mainly in limited numbers by the American Telegraphone Company, in competition with the more successful wax-disc-based recorders, the dictaphone and ediphone. Magnetic wire recorders were especially popular in the U.S. 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, 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 Fidelipak, 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 Cusino. These developed into the Munz Stereopak, or 4-track, created by Earl Madman Munz 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 Autocom FlexiDisc. The 1960s saw the invention of two important new media for sound playback, the Compaq cassette and the 8-track. The cassette was invented by Lou Ottens and a team at the Dutch company Philips in 1963. Ottens had led the development of Philips' 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 Krauss at the Learjet Corporation, adopted from the Fidelipac. The 8-track's 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-Philips 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 Cain Cramer, 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 store 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 2GB of memory and cost $2,000. But the market really changed with the introduction of the Apple iPod in 2001, which offered 5GB 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. And maybe 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 lifeform 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 History Guy. 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