Speaker 1: Get in tech with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm a producer host a
Speaker 1: gad about town here at how Stuff Works, and I
Speaker 1: love all things tech and we're going to continue our
Speaker 1: series of listener requests about tech that relates back to music. Today,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about a request from listener Gelert. Gellert wrote
Speaker 1: in to ask that I do an episode about DJ technology.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing, there's a ton to cover in DJ tech,
Speaker 1: and I could have just done one sort of overview episode,
Speaker 1: but I don't feel like that's really the spirit of
Speaker 1: this show, and I don't think it just I don't
Speaker 1: think it will do justice to Gellert's request, and I
Speaker 1: don't think it really serves you guys well as lessners.
Speaker 1: So instead, I'm gonna take my time and for this
Speaker 1: particular episode, I'm going to focus on the origin of
Speaker 1: one piece of technology used in DJ work, and that
Speaker 1: would be the predecessor of the turntable. That's right, I'm
Speaker 1: not even really talking about the turntable in this episode because,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, no pun intended. I'm probably gonna
Speaker 1: be saying turn a lot this episode, but trust me,
Speaker 1: I'm not intending it to be kind of a pun.
Speaker 1: But as it turns out, it's a very long and
Speaker 1: rich history, and it's really interesting well before it ever
Speaker 1: becomes what we would typically call a turntable or a
Speaker 1: record player. So this is part one, and in part
Speaker 1: two we will continue that story before moving on to
Speaker 1: other listener requests that also have to do with music.
Speaker 1: So a few years ago, I probably would have made
Speaker 1: a joke, In fact, I know I would have made
Speaker 1: the joke that most of you guys out there have
Speaker 1: no idea what a turntable is because vinyl had gone
Speaker 1: out of favor after a while, and really the only
Speaker 1: people who were interested in vinyl were collectors and DJ's
Speaker 1: and everyone else had kind of lost any connection to it.
Speaker 1: But since then, vinyl has obviously experienced a renaissance. You've
Speaker 1: got a lot more bands that are producing albums in vinyl,
Speaker 1: You've got a lot more companies out there making equipment
Speaker 1: to play vinyl. You've got a lot more people out
Speaker 1: there interested in buying it. So heck, the Facebook friendship
Speaker 1: anniversary videos that you get whenever it's your anniversary of
Speaker 1: making friends with someone on Facebook that features a vinyl
Speaker 1: album being placed on a turntable, so the references are
Speaker 1: out there. So I'm gonna assume y'all know what a
Speaker 1: turntable is. Now. In my neck of the woods, we
Speaker 1: sometimes would call these record players, but you should know
Speaker 1: record players and turntables are technically two different types of technology.
Speaker 1: They're very similar. A record player has a turntable incorporated
Speaker 1: into it, but you shouldn't just use the terms interchangeably,
Speaker 1: like I am probably going to you, because old habits
Speaker 1: die hard, y'all. So this is a really big story,
Speaker 1: and like I said, this is part one of the
Speaker 1: history of turntables and how they work. In our next episode,
Speaker 1: we'll pick up where we left off today and uh
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, that'll be just before World War Two, but
Speaker 1: we're gonna go from its origins up to that point today,
Speaker 1: and then maybe we'll start chatting in the next episode
Speaker 1: about some of the features you'll find on modern turntable,
Speaker 1: specifically the ones that professional d j z is because
Speaker 1: they've got some metaphorical bells and whistles that you won't
Speaker 1: find on your typical record player at home. Now, I
Speaker 1: feel like I've talked a lot about the physics of
Speaker 1: sound over the past few episodes, so I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: hit the high points so that we have that foundation.
Speaker 1: Sound is vibration, and we primarily hear sounds through these
Speaker 1: vibrations affecting the tympanic membrane in our ears, which transfers
Speaker 1: those vibrations to structures called cochlea inside our inner ear,
Speaker 1: And inside the cochlea there's fluid that when it moves
Speaker 1: due to these vibrations, it stimulates special nerve cells that
Speaker 1: then send impulses to the brain, which interprets all of
Speaker 1: that as sound. I think that's the most important bits
Speaker 1: that I could hit. But remembering that sound is a
Speaker 1: physical phenomena, it is vibration, that's the important part. When
Speaker 1: it comes to the history of turntables and recorded sound. Now,
Speaker 1: the idea of a device that could play back sound
Speaker 1: dates back much further than our ability to achieve such
Speaker 1: a goal. This what came as a big surprise to me.
Speaker 1: So there was a great French novelist, seven Yen de
Speaker 1: Siernald de Bejarac, who lived during the seventeen century. He
Speaker 1: actually wrote about such a potential gadget not in a
Speaker 1: way of or not as a means of making one like.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a set of instructions, but rather just a
Speaker 1: concept he had. And this is, by the way, the
Speaker 1: person whom the play sierra No de Bergerac was based
Speaker 1: upon it was a real person, and he actually did
Speaker 1: have quite the shnaws on him. If you know the
Speaker 1: story of Sierrano de Bergerac, you know he was regarded
Speaker 1: as a man who was very gifted in language, a
Speaker 1: wonderful poet, but also, and not to mention, a deadly duelist,
Speaker 1: but also a guy who had a really big nose.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, the real Sierrano de Bergerac was
Speaker 1: all those things, but most of the other elements in
Speaker 1: the famous play based off of his life are largely invented. Anyway,
Speaker 1: sierra No wrote the following about a device he discovered.
Speaker 1: Let's say, in a dream. He was dreaming about the
Speaker 1: moon and possible inhabitants of the moon, and he in
Speaker 1: this dream he encounters a box, and he says, when
Speaker 1: I opened a box, I found something made of metal
Speaker 1: somewhat like our locks, full of an endless number of
Speaker 1: little springs and tiny machines. It was indeed a book,
Speaker 1: but it was a miraculous one that had no pages
Speaker 1: or printed letters. It was a book to be read
Speaker 1: not with the eyes, but with ears. When anyone wants
Speaker 1: to read, he winds up the machine with a large
Speaker 1: number of keys of all kinds. Then he turns the
Speaker 1: indicator to the chapter he wants to listen to. As
Speaker 1: though from the mouth of a person or a musical instrument,
Speaker 1: come all the distinct and different sounds that the upper
Speaker 1: class moon beings used in their language. When I thought
Speaker 1: about this marvelous way of making books, I was no
Speaker 1: longer surprised that the young people of that country know
Speaker 1: more at the age of sixteen or eighteen than the
Speaker 1: graybeards of our world. They can read as soon as
Speaker 1: they can talk, and are never at a loss for
Speaker 1: reading material. In their rooms, on walks in town, during
Speaker 1: voyages on foot, or on horseback, they can have thirty
Speaker 1: books in their pockets or hanging on the pommels of
Speaker 1: their saddles. They need only wind to spring to hear
Speaker 1: one or more chapters, or a whole book, if they wish. Thus,
Speaker 1: you always have with you all the great men, both
Speaker 1: living and dead, who speak to you in their own voices. Now,
Speaker 1: I think that's actually a remarkable dream when you think
Speaker 1: about it, because what Siatrano de Bergerac is describing in
Speaker 1: this fanciful description of a dream are are things that
Speaker 1: we have today. The idea of having a device that's
Speaker 1: able to play back for you and audio copy of
Speaker 1: a book. I mean, we have entire businesses that are
Speaker 1: built around making audio books available and then devices that
Speaker 1: can play those, and so sierr No's just being fanciful,
Speaker 1: but today we actually have that stuff. So this was
Speaker 1: kind of amazing science fiction from this uh, this French
Speaker 1: author back in hundreds of years ago. So it's a
Speaker 1: charming dream, but as I said, it was a little
Speaker 1: more than wishful thinking in sierr No's day. It would
Speaker 1: take two more centuries before someone attempted a practical means
Speaker 1: to convert sound into a recorded medium. And it was
Speaker 1: in a peculiar but a clever way. Before there was
Speaker 1: ever a phonograph or a grammophone, and certainly long before
Speaker 1: there were turntables or record players, there was the phone autograph.
Speaker 1: A nineteenth century French bookseller named Edward Leon Scott de
Speaker 1: Martinville came up with the idea or Martin Villa, if
Speaker 1: you prefer it, came up with this idea and it
Speaker 1: was a pretty cool one. In the eighteen fifties. Eddie,
Speaker 1: as I call him, was reflecting on the growing art
Speaker 1: and science of photography, which was a very young technology
Speaker 1: at that time. Photographs were able to capture moments in
Speaker 1: still images, but what if you could capture sound in
Speaker 1: a similar way and make a record of actual audible stimuli.
Speaker 1: Scott created a design for a machine that would do
Speaker 1: just that. It did not record sound directly to a
Speaker 1: medium exactly, but rather made a record of sound upon
Speaker 1: a visual format. He proposed mounting an acoustic trumpet over
Speaker 1: a pane of glass that was coated in lamp black,
Speaker 1: so sort of like a kind of like an ink.
Speaker 1: The flared end of the trumpet would face the sounds
Speaker 1: you wish to document, so it's almost like the business
Speaker 1: end of a microphone. You would put the sound into
Speaker 1: that side of it. The small end of the trumpet
Speaker 1: had a very thin membrane stretched across it, so uh,
Speaker 1: if it were a classical trumpet, the part that you
Speaker 1: would blow in the mouthpiece that would have a little
Speaker 1: membrane on it. Mounted on the center of this membrane,
Speaker 1: facing away from the interior of the trumpet and toward
Speaker 1: the pane of glass, would be a small needle made
Speaker 1: from a flexible but stiff material such as boar's hair.
Speaker 1: This needle would make very light contact with that pane
Speaker 1: of glass, just enough so that if the needle would
Speaker 1: move due to vibrations in the membrane, it would disturb
Speaker 1: the lamp black. Vibrations in the membrane. Now, I feel
Speaker 1: like singing a song, but I'm not gonna Scott proposed
Speaker 1: moving the lamp black so that the needle would gently
Speaker 1: drag across it, and then speaking into the trumpet, you
Speaker 1: would create these vibrations and that would end up tracing
Speaker 1: patterns on the lamp black. You would smear the lamp
Speaker 1: black away and what would be left is a pattern
Speaker 1: that would represent whatever the sound was that went into
Speaker 1: the trumpet. So you would have a record of what
Speaker 1: happened just dragged in this lamp black. Now, he didn't
Speaker 1: intend for this device to have any useful ability to
Speaker 1: play back sound. Instead, he thought it would create a
Speaker 1: type of natural stenography that way of actually taking down dictation.
Speaker 1: For example, it would be a visual record of the
Speaker 1: noises that were present during the recording session, and perhaps
Speaker 1: one day, with enough study, we would be able to
Speaker 1: read the words that were spoken simply by looking at
Speaker 1: the patterns that had been left behind in the lampblack. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, you might say the same sound over
Speaker 1: and over and over again while you use this machine,
Speaker 1: you look for the pattern that's made from speaking that
Speaker 1: sound while the machine is in use, and then you say,
Speaker 1: all right, every time I see this particular shape in
Speaker 1: this kind of glass, I know that it was that
Speaker 1: sound that made this shape. That was kind of the
Speaker 1: basis of his idea. As it turns out, this wasn't
Speaker 1: that far fetched. In fact, it's now been done more
Speaker 1: than a century later. In two thousand and eight, historians
Speaker 1: were able to use optical imaging to scan phone autograph
Speaker 1: cylinders and play back the sound. There's a great example
Speaker 1: of one that recorded someone singing au Claire de la lune,
Speaker 1: a French folks song. The sound file the historians generated
Speaker 1: at first didn't sound anything like that. It didn't sound
Speaker 1: recognizable at all, at least not to me. But they
Speaker 1: built in some algorithms to clean stuff up, to adjust
Speaker 1: the playback speed, to remove some harmonics to enhance some
Speaker 1: other elements of it, and then once they were done,
Speaker 1: it was unmistakably au Claire de la Loon. By eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine, Scott partnered with a man named Rudolph Kinnig,
Speaker 1: who specialized in building precise instrumentation. He was a machinist.
Speaker 1: The two determined that one necessary requirement was a means
Speaker 1: to have an accurate and precise measurement of the passing
Speaker 1: of time in relation to the creation of a recording.
Speaker 1: By using a tuning fork of a known pitch, the
Speaker 1: two could determine the amount of time that passed during
Speaker 1: any part of a recording. A tuning fork will always
Speaker 1: vibrate at the same frequency. The specific frequency depends upon
Speaker 1: the tuning forks. So if you have a tuning fork
Speaker 1: with a fundamental frequency of the note A, it will
Speaker 1: vibrate at four hundred forty times per second or four
Speaker 1: hundred forty hurts. So if you have an a tuning
Speaker 1: fork and you strike it and then you put that
Speaker 1: next to one of these phonautographs as it's recording, you'll
Speaker 1: get this very even pattern that's made from the vibration
Speaker 1: of that needle. And if you count the repetition of
Speaker 1: that pattern, essentially the wave that you're seeing. You should
Speaker 1: be able to say, well, this this stretch represents one second,
Speaker 1: because there are four hundred and forty of those repeated
Speaker 1: patterns here, and we know that the tuning fork it
Speaker 1: vibrates at four forty times per seconds. So by counting
Speaker 1: those up and we get to four or forty, we say,
Speaker 1: all right, that represents one second of recording time. And
Speaker 1: according to the National Park Service website, Scott's original design
Speaker 1: would move the glass pane across the needle at a
Speaker 1: speed of about one meter per second, which is pretty
Speaker 1: darn fast. Now. The reason I mentioned Scott's work is
Speaker 1: to point out that many different people were thinking about
Speaker 1: ways to preserve sound, whether in a format that could
Speaker 1: be played back or some other method of notation, and
Speaker 1: a few looked at Scott's work and began to wonder
Speaker 1: if such a thing would be possible with the phonoten graph.
Speaker 1: One such smarty pants was Alexander Graham Bell, who theorized
Speaker 1: that if you could find a means to trace the
Speaker 1: patterns created by the phonotograph and transmit vibrations to a membrane,
Speaker 1: you could recreate the sound that originally was responsible for
Speaker 1: the markings. In other words, if you reverse this process
Speaker 1: where the patterns that are on the pane of glass
Speaker 1: can transfer vibrations back to a needle, back to a membrane,
Speaker 1: you should be able to replicate the sound that made
Speaker 1: those patterns in the first place. But he couldn't quite
Speaker 1: figure out how to do it, Plus he was kind
Speaker 1: of busy with other stuff, like inventing the telephone. In
Speaker 1: April eighteen seventy seven, a French poet named Charles Kroll
Speaker 1: suggested a method he thought might just work. And this
Speaker 1: is where I really marvel at how French poets were
Speaker 1: so forward thinking and inventive. Anyway, Miss r Krow said
Speaker 1: that if you could etch sound into a medium, such
Speaker 1: as a disc of tempered steel, you could create an
Speaker 1: apparatus that could use those etchings to recreate the original sound.
Speaker 1: He called his proposed invention a paleophone. He filed a
Speaker 1: paper on the subject with the French Academy of Science,
Speaker 1: wherein more or less was forgotten about for a few months. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: another person was at work on this concept, and that
Speaker 1: was the Wizard of Menlo Park himself, Thomas Edison now
Speaker 1: a moment here. I think Edison gets an awful lot
Speaker 1: of credit for this field, and it is good to
Speaker 1: remind ourselves that he was not the only big thinker
Speaker 1: out there. It's also important to acknowledge that Edison employed
Speaker 1: a lot of people, and many of those people contributed
Speaker 1: in very meaningful ways to the things that he had invented.
Speaker 1: So we really should mention that a lot of Edison's
Speaker 1: inventions were truly collaborative efforts, at least when it got
Speaker 1: to the part of taking an idea and making it
Speaker 1: a real thing. Now, that's not to take away from Edison.
Speaker 1: He really was a remarkable innovator. He did come up
Speaker 1: with these amazing ideas. But we do need to also
Speaker 1: credit the other people who contributed, and they should get
Speaker 1: some props for their work well. According to the story,
Speaker 1: Edison first got the idea for what would become the
Speaker 1: phonograph by accident. He had been working on a completely
Speaker 1: different piece of technology that was designed to record incoming
Speaker 1: Morse code messages from a telegraph machine. So his invention
Speaker 1: consisted of paper that was wrapped around a rotating drum
Speaker 1: and a stylus connected to the incoming telegraph messages would
Speaker 1: move against the paper as the drum rotated, and it
Speaker 1: would make indentations that would indicate the dots and dashes
Speaker 1: from the Morse code. Edison told his buddy Edward H.
Speaker 1: Johnson about it, and how when Edison rotated the drum
Speaker 1: quickly and the stylists vibrated against those indentations that it
Speaker 1: may it would create this sort of humming noise. And
Speaker 1: Edison theorized that he could use a device like that
Speaker 1: if he fitted it with a diaphragm as opposed to
Speaker 1: having it connected to a telegraph machine, he might be
Speaker 1: able to record sound directly to a physical medium and
Speaker 1: play it back. The diaphragm would vibrate, the stylist would
Speaker 1: move against the paper drum, and then if you spun
Speaker 1: it again, like if you reset the needle at the top,
Speaker 1: and you spun the drum again, then it would cause
Speaker 1: that needle or that stylist to vibrate, transmit those vibrations
Speaker 1: to the membrane, and then you would have the sound again.
Speaker 1: Now he was doing this independently. He had not read
Speaker 1: of Crow's work, so this was not him copying someone else.
Speaker 1: He was just kind of theorizing to his buddy, and
Speaker 1: he thought that's a neat idea. Well, Edward Johnson thought
Speaker 1: it was way more than a neat idea. He actually
Speaker 1: went and wrote to the journal Scientific American UH, which
Speaker 1: published the letter that said Edison was working on a
Speaker 1: quote speaking telegraph in the quote device. Now this put
Speaker 1: a bunch of pressure on Edison. He was in a pickle.
Speaker 1: He needed to either get to work on actually inventing
Speaker 1: this thing he had sort of just been kind of
Speaker 1: hypothesizing about to his friend, or risk facing a public
Speaker 1: failure in in not doing so. So he began to
Speaker 1: work in Earnest on creating a gadget capable of recording
Speaker 1: sound to physical media. Edison created a design based on
Speaker 1: his ideas and then sent that design to a machinist
Speaker 1: in his employee named John Crucy. Crucy had worked for
Speaker 1: the Singer Sewing Machine Company before Edison hired him away,
Speaker 1: and he had impressed Edison with his astounding skill at
Speaker 1: fabricating machine parts that could bring to life Edison's ideas.
Speaker 1: The phonograph was no exception. With little more instruction from
Speaker 1: Edison than build this, Crucy got to work fabricating the
Speaker 1: pieces necessary to make the first phonograph prototype. The original
Speaker 1: phonograph had a cylindrical drum upon which Edison would wrap
Speaker 1: a sheet of tin foil. A needle would rest against
Speaker 1: the tin foil, and when Edison would turn a crank,
Speaker 1: the cylinder would rotate and the needle would move along
Speaker 1: the length of the cylinder, slowly, creating a spiral groove
Speaker 1: as it did so. The needle was connected to a
Speaker 1: simple microphone's diaphragm, and by speaking very loudly into the microphone,
Speaker 1: which was essentially a trumpet, Edison can make the diaphragm vibrate,
Speaker 1: transmitting those vibrations to the needle, which would then create
Speaker 1: indentations in the tin foil, so the needles path and
Speaker 1: that spiral would vary according to those vibrations. On that
Speaker 1: first try, Edison recorded a nursery rhyme Mary had a
Speaker 1: little lamb. After turning the crank and speaking loudly into
Speaker 1: the microphone, Edison stopped. He removed the needle from the cylinder.
Speaker 1: He raised the cylinder back to its starting point, placed
Speaker 1: a slightly different needle attachment against the tinfoil, which was
Speaker 1: connected to a small loudspeaker, and then turned the crank
Speaker 1: and the machine began to rotate the drum again, and
Speaker 1: the most amazing thing happened, the machine reproduced Edison's words.
Speaker 1: According to Edison, everyone was astonished that the device actually worked,
Speaker 1: and Edison himself said he was always terrified by inventions
Speaker 1: that worked the first time he tried them. Edison would
Speaker 1: create several more phonographs in this way, most of which
Speaker 1: were reserved for demonstration purposes. Those invention, while serviceable, had
Speaker 1: some big drawbacks, and one of those was that it
Speaker 1: was pretty fragile. Specifically, the tinfoil was really fragile. It
Speaker 1: would rip easily after just a couple of playbacks, and
Speaker 1: it would take some other innovative folks to come up
Speaker 1: with an alternative to tinfoil to push the the invention
Speaker 1: a little further. I'll talk about them in just a second,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's Jonathan and before we jump into the
Speaker 1: rest of this show, I just want to give a
Speaker 1: quick shout out to a new podcast that's come out
Speaker 1: from How Stuff Works, the soundtrack show hosted by David Collins,
Speaker 1: and I just thought it was thematically linked to the
Speaker 1: whole turntable idea. This is a show that's specifically about
Speaker 1: movie scores and soundtracks and how they affect the way
Speaker 1: we perceive the films, the life they have beyond films,
Speaker 1: the inspiration and influences that went into the creation of
Speaker 1: those soundtracks. This is my jam, guys. I love soundtracks.
Speaker 1: So if you are really passionate about music in general
Speaker 1: and movie music in particular, check it out. It's the
Speaker 1: Soundtracks Show. You can find it on iTunes or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts. And now back to the show. Alright.
Speaker 1: So Edison's invention was met with enthusiasm, but others also
Speaker 1: wondered how the design might be proved upon to get
Speaker 1: a better quality of audio and more robust recordings that
Speaker 1: could last longer than a couple of playbacks, and a
Speaker 1: couple of scientists named Charles Sumner Tainter and chi Chester
Speaker 1: Bell proposed an alternative. By the way to Jester. Bell
Speaker 1: was a cousin of Alexander Graham Bell, and they both
Speaker 1: worked for Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory. Alexander Graham Bell
Speaker 1: got a ten thousand dollar grant as the inventor of
Speaker 1: the telephone and he set up this volta laboratory using
Speaker 1: that money. They said that instead of using a sheet
Speaker 1: of tinfoil wrapped around the cylinder, they were going to
Speaker 1: use a cylinder of cardboard that would be coded with wax.
Speaker 1: Another difference between the two methods was that the wax
Speaker 1: cylinder phonographs would etch or engrave patterns on the wax,
Speaker 1: whereas the tin foil predecessors depended upon indentations in the
Speaker 1: tin foil. So think of it as you know, as
Speaker 1: as going left and right across a surface, as opposed
Speaker 1: to in and out of it using more or less
Speaker 1: pressure from a stylus. The cylinders, as I said, were
Speaker 1: made of cardboard coated in wax. Uh. They had a
Speaker 1: spring powered motor that in at least the later versions
Speaker 1: of this methodology, they used a spring powered motor to
Speaker 1: provide power to move the components, which meant you no
Speaker 1: longer had to depend upon a hand crank to turn everything,
Speaker 1: because if you're trying to keep a steady pace turning
Speaker 1: a hand crank, chances are you're gonna slow down or
Speaker 1: speed up at different parts. That's going to affect the
Speaker 1: quality of the recording. They wanted to have a better
Speaker 1: way of maintaining consistency, so they went with this spring motor.
Speaker 1: Now you still had to wind up the motor. So
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen any images of people winding up
Speaker 1: gramophone very quickly and then allowing it to start to
Speaker 1: turn and then using the needle, that's essentially what's happening here.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like winding up the clockwork in a
Speaker 1: clock This was aldd in more even and replicable recording
Speaker 1: in playback sessions. The speed of those cylinders was faster
Speaker 1: than what you would find with vinyl record players decades later.
Speaker 1: That typical device would spin a cylinder at a hundred
Speaker 1: twenty revolutions per minute. So why would you want to
Speaker 1: go fast? Why not go slower? Why not record sound
Speaker 1: at a slower rpm? The main reason was due to volume.
Speaker 1: It turned out that if you turn these cylinders at
Speaker 1: a slower rate, it would generate a much lower volume.
Speaker 1: The amplitude of the sound would be lower, and it'd
Speaker 1: be harder to hear. So you had to create a
Speaker 1: faster speed, which would create stronger vibrations when the playback
Speaker 1: needle is running across this groove in a wax cylinder,
Speaker 1: and then that would result in the membrane vibrating more
Speaker 1: and you would have greater amplitude or volume in the sound.
Speaker 1: So it's really just a practical concern. It wasn't that
Speaker 1: there any other reason, like any specific mechanical reason why
Speaker 1: it had to be a hundred and twenty revolutions per minute.
Speaker 1: It was all about why can we do that will
Speaker 1: give us the best quality versus volume of sound, And
Speaker 1: at the time, that was pretty much it. The largest
Speaker 1: cylinders would you would allow you to record up to
Speaker 1: about three minutes of continuous sound at that rotational speed,
Speaker 1: although very few cylinders actually had a full three minutes
Speaker 1: of sound. Most of them were closer to two minutes.
Speaker 1: The wax would wear away or tear off after a
Speaker 1: couple of dozen playbacks, so you were still limited and
Speaker 1: how frequently you could listen to any given wax cylinder.
Speaker 1: It was better than tinfoil, but it still would degrade
Speaker 1: each time you listen, So really you would think about
Speaker 1: every time you listen to one of these cylinders there
Speaker 1: was wear and tear on that cylinder. You were effectively
Speaker 1: decreasing the number of playbacks by one every time you
Speaker 1: listen to it. And if you weren't gentle with them,
Speaker 1: you could break them. Pieces of cylinder could break off,
Speaker 1: and then you would lose that part of the recording,
Speaker 1: So there still wasn't perfect. The Volta Lab fellas called
Speaker 1: their invention the graphophone. Edison, who by this time had
Speaker 1: moved on to work on other projects, namely the incandescent lightbulb,
Speaker 1: heard of the graphaphone and decided that he would give
Speaker 1: his phonograph idea another go. Originally, the Volta Labs came
Speaker 1: to Edison and proposed a collaboration. Edison, being a little
Speaker 1: more independently minded. If he wasn't in charge, he didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily want to be part of it this side. Instead,
Speaker 1: he would work on improving the phonograph on his own
Speaker 1: rather than collaborate with other inventors. So he chose to
Speaker 1: use cylinders made entirely out of wax instead of a
Speaker 1: cardboard cylinder with wax coding. This way, after the play
Speaker 1: surface had degraded to a point where it was no
Speaker 1: longer desirable, you could actually shave down the outside right
Speaker 1: of the cylinder to create a new smooth recording surface,
Speaker 1: so you could put a whole new recording on there.
Speaker 1: The old recording would be lost because you shaved it,
Speaker 1: but you would be able to put new stuff on
Speaker 1: the old cylinder, so you could reuse cylinders and make
Speaker 1: them a little more useful. A typical cylinder was four
Speaker 1: point to five inches long, which is about ten point
Speaker 1: eight centimeters, and it was two point one eight seven
Speaker 1: five inches in diameter, or about five point six centimeters.
Speaker 1: Those cylinders were the ones that could hold about two
Speaker 1: minutes worth of stuff on them. In eighteen nine nine,
Speaker 1: Edison introduced a model of the phonograph that could play
Speaker 1: cylinders that were the same length as in They were
Speaker 1: still four point to five inches long, but now they
Speaker 1: were thicker. They were five inches in diameter that's about
Speaker 1: twelve point seven centimeters. They could hold more recorded material,
Speaker 1: but they were also more expensive, as was the special
Speaker 1: phonograph that could play these cylinders, and because of that expense,
Speaker 1: not a whole lot of bought them. Not a whole
Speaker 1: lot of people or businesses bought them. It's just prohibitively expensive.
Speaker 1: Edison's cylinders were made of a combination of bees wax,
Speaker 1: sterec acid, and saracen now sterec or steric wax I
Speaker 1: guess i should say, combines steric acid, which is a
Speaker 1: fatty acid from vegetable oil or from tallow which is
Speaker 1: from animal fat. And the steric acid helps hold waxes shape,
Speaker 1: so you would combine it with wax, and that allows
Speaker 1: it when it hardens to maintain its relative shape. It
Speaker 1: doesn't lose that over time, because you could think of
Speaker 1: wax is sort of like a very very viscous fluid.
Speaker 1: Saracen is a paraffin wax, that means it's a petroleum product.
Speaker 1: So you would take that and combine that with the
Speaker 1: bees wax, which was clearly wax from bees, and the
Speaker 1: ysteric wax, and that's what Asen used to make his
Speaker 1: cylinders that were better suited for phonographs. People began to
Speaker 1: call cylinders with recordings on them reck kords, So originally
Speaker 1: records in the sense of audio meant these wax cylinders,
Speaker 1: not the discs that we associate with the word today.
Speaker 1: So you would have a record and it would be
Speaker 1: a wax cylinder. The various models of graphophones and phonographs
Speaker 1: had different output devices. Some graphophones, the earlier ones had
Speaker 1: sort of stethoscope like hearing attachments, so you would plug
Speaker 1: these directly into your ears. They would have a tube
Speaker 1: that would go straight to the graphophone and the sounds
Speaker 1: would travel through the tubes to your ears. They were
Speaker 1: kind of like old timey predecessors to today's earbuds others.
Speaker 1: The later models would use a trumpet, a sound trumpet
Speaker 1: through which sound would emerge. Phonographs were very similar. These
Speaker 1: devices used acoustics to amplify sound as best they could,
Speaker 1: and in an upcoming episode, we'll talk more about the
Speaker 1: invention of speakers and how that changed things dramatically. A
Speaker 1: business and named Jesse H. Lippincott purchased an exclusive license
Speaker 1: from the American Graphophone Company that was headed by the
Speaker 1: Volta Lab Fellas. Then he acquired the Edison Phonograph Company
Speaker 1: from Edison, so he essentially had acquired one company and
Speaker 1: gotten the exclusive license from that company's competitor, which many
Speaker 1: had a united front and the two companies could share
Speaker 1: best practices across each other. He would go on to
Speaker 1: purchase other companies in a similar fashion and created the
Speaker 1: North American Phonograph Company in eight Lippincott thought that the
Speaker 1: technologies only real application at that time was for business,
Speaker 1: essentially for taking dictation, but he encountered some resistance, specifically
Speaker 1: from stenographers. They did not like the idea of being
Speaker 1: pushed out of a job by a machine, which is
Speaker 1: a familiar story throughout all of the Industrial Revolution and
Speaker 1: leading up to even today. Automation is still a big
Speaker 1: topic when it comes to the impact on the job market. Well,
Speaker 1: the same was true in the eighteen eighties, and business
Speaker 1: wasn't great for this new company. Within a couple of years,
Speaker 1: Lippincott was struggling and his health was failing as well.
Speaker 1: So Edison, who had been a lender to Lippincott the
Speaker 1: majority lender, uh ended up assuming control of the company,
Speaker 1: and by e two he had increased the appeal of
Speaker 1: cylinders by branching into entertainment. He wasn't just producing business machines,
Speaker 1: but he would record people playing musical instruments, or singing
Speaker 1: an aria from an opera, or delivering a comedic monologue,
Speaker 1: and so he was really kind of pushing the phonograph
Speaker 1: as an entertainment device as well as a business device.
Speaker 1: He didn't abandon business, he just added to it. His
Speaker 1: cylinders became known as brown wax, which is kind of
Speaker 1: funny because that was not always the actual color of
Speaker 1: the cylinders, but it did end up sticking. From here,
Speaker 1: things get a bit more business ee rather than technological.
Speaker 1: Edison would declare bankruptcy for the phonograph company. That gave
Speaker 1: him the opportunity to buy back the rights to the
Speaker 1: phonograph itself, the technology, and he did that in eight
Speaker 1: It took two years for this bankruptcy business to work
Speaker 1: its way through the entire process, so he wasn't allowed
Speaker 1: to sell phonographs until that concluded, which meant from eight
Speaker 1: he continued working on developing the phonograph and improving the technology,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't actually sell any of them. In eighteen six,
Speaker 1: he was making phonographs for home users. Before, phonographs had
Speaker 1: either been business equipment or they had been restricted to
Speaker 1: places like bars or penny arcades as sort of a
Speaker 1: novelty entertainment system. You can think of them as sort
Speaker 1: of a proto juke box, so people could go and
Speaker 1: listen to music. They put like a nickel in the
Speaker 1: machine and then it would play for them a little song,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't own one in your own home at
Speaker 1: that point. Now Edison was trying to change that. He
Speaker 1: was trying to create a home market for this technology,
Speaker 1: so he's bringing recorded music into the home, at least
Speaker 1: a home that could afford such a luxury. Mass manufacturing
Speaker 1: helped make this possible. In the early eighteen nineties, a
Speaker 1: phonograph would set you back a hundred fifty dollars now
Speaker 1: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index,
Speaker 1: that would be equivalent to about three thousand, nine hundred
Speaker 1: dollars today for a phonograph that could play two minute
Speaker 1: long recordings on wax cylinders. By the late eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: so one decade later, Edison had brought that price down
Speaker 1: on the standard phonograph to twenty dollars. That would be
Speaker 1: about the same as five hundred sixty three dollars in
Speaker 1: today's money. Or you could go bargain bin shopping and
Speaker 1: you could buy a model that they offered that was
Speaker 1: called the gem G E M. This one cost the
Speaker 1: bargain basement price of seven dollars fifty cents. Now in
Speaker 1: that amount was still pretty considerable. If we convert that
Speaker 1: for today's money, you're talking about two eleven dollars, so
Speaker 1: still pretty expensive, but more in the realm of affordability.
Speaker 1: For at least a larger portion of potential customers. The cylinders,
Speaker 1: by the way, cost about fifty cents each. That would
Speaker 1: be about fourteen dollars in today's money. Now keep in
Speaker 1: mind this was for a cylinder that could hold two
Speaker 1: or maybe three minutes of material, So it's kind of
Speaker 1: like buying a single from a musical artist for fourteen bucks.
Speaker 1: And those larger cylinders I mentioned earlier, if you wanted
Speaker 1: to get one that could hold more information on it,
Speaker 1: that would set you back uh about four dollars per cylinders.
Speaker 1: So if we adjust that for inflation, you're talking a
Speaker 1: hundred and thirteen dollars per cylinder. Now keep in mind
Speaker 1: those are reusable. Once you wear out the recording that
Speaker 1: was imprinted on the cylinder, you could have it shaved
Speaker 1: down and you could record something new on it, but
Speaker 1: you would still lose the first recording that was on there.
Speaker 1: So it's a tough cell. Now. The wax cylinders were
Speaker 1: expensive relatively because even though they were made out of
Speaker 1: inexpensive materials, wax was not hard to come by. They
Speaker 1: weren't easy to mass produce. You could mass produce them eventually,
Speaker 1: but it was never an easy process. In fact, Edison
Speaker 1: didn't hit upon a mass production method for his cylinders
Speaker 1: until nineteen o one. Previously, every single cylinder went through
Speaker 1: an engraving process to have a recording set on that cylinder.
Speaker 1: The new method involved using a mold rather than engraving.
Speaker 1: It also meant the cylinders were made of a harder wax.
Speaker 1: So first you would create a master mold using gold
Speaker 1: electrodes to carve away the bits that don't represent sound.
Speaker 1: This was called a gold mold. You would then pour
Speaker 1: this into or cast it as a mold. You would
Speaker 1: pour wax into the mold, and you allow the mold
Speaker 1: to harden or the wax to harden within the mold. Rather,
Speaker 1: a single mold could create up to a hundred fifty
Speaker 1: cylinders every day. Well, that made it possible to bring
Speaker 1: the price for the cylinders down to about thirty five
Speaker 1: cents per cylinder in nineteen o four, which would be
Speaker 1: about six dollars and sixty cents in today's cash, so
Speaker 1: a little more reasonable. Uh. Before that, though, it was
Speaker 1: just a painstaking process which kept the price high. While
Speaker 1: all this was going on, the competitor to the cylinder
Speaker 1: was gaining popularity, and that would be the disc format,
Speaker 1: which eventually would evolve into the vinyl records we know
Speaker 1: and love today. But in their earliest days, there was
Speaker 1: no guarantee that they would win out in the format wars.
Speaker 1: We can trace the history of the record disc to
Speaker 1: its birth on November eight seven. That's when Emil Berliner,
Speaker 1: a German who had moved to Washington, d C. Patented
Speaker 1: his own system for sound recording. Berliner has got a
Speaker 1: really fascinating past. He had originally worked for a dry
Speaker 1: goods store when he immigrated to the United States and
Speaker 1: began living in Washington, d C. Later, he took on
Speaker 1: a job as a laboratory cleaning staff member for Constantine Falberg.
Speaker 1: Fallberg was the man who discovered and named the compound saccharin.
Speaker 1: While working for Fallberg, Berlinard became interested in the idea
Speaker 1: of experimentation and innovation. Berlinar would go on to work
Speaker 1: for the American Bell Telephone Company. He even invented a
Speaker 1: loose contact telephone transmitter, which I think is quite a
Speaker 1: leap from a laboratory janitor, and by eighteen eighties six
Speaker 1: he started thinking about a device that would evolve into
Speaker 1: what we now call the gramophone. While Edison and the
Speaker 1: Volta Boys were working with wax cylinders. Berlinnard proposed the
Speaker 1: flat disc as an alternative medium for sound recording. His
Speaker 1: original discs were made of glass, and he actually used
Speaker 1: a method similar to Scott's fanatograph, tracing a pattern onto
Speaker 1: glass and then using a process called photo engraving to
Speaker 1: transfer those traced patterns onto a sturdier disc. This was
Speaker 1: in fact the methodology that Miss R. Charles Crow had
Speaker 1: suggested back in eighteen seventy seven, but Berlinard was not
Speaker 1: aware of Crow's work, so he came to the solution independently.
Speaker 1: So you've got both Edison and now you've got uh,
Speaker 1: you've got Berliner, both coming up with similar ideas based
Speaker 1: upon something that someone else had had thought of, well
Speaker 1: not based upon it, but similar to what someone else
Speaker 1: had thought of a decade earlier. And it's just kind
Speaker 1: of remarkable how these ideas were independently arrived at. So
Speaker 1: Crow himself had never built a working device to bring
Speaker 1: his idea to life. Berliner actually took that step, and
Speaker 1: the photo engraving process is pretty cool. I'll give you
Speaker 1: a quick overview first. What you would do is you
Speaker 1: take the material you plan to engrave, and you code
Speaker 1: it with a light sensitive photo resist chemical. So it's
Speaker 1: a chemical that when you expose that stuff to light
Speaker 1: will harden material. So you take the glass with the
Speaker 1: patterns traced on them, and you would use that as
Speaker 1: a mask against this blank disk of material. The material
Speaker 1: you're playing on engraving, the blacked out part on your
Speaker 1: glass disc, the part where the needle did not touch,
Speaker 1: that becomes a shield. It shields the light from hitting
Speaker 1: your blank disc. But the part where the needle traced
Speaker 1: is a little clear section and light can pass through
Speaker 1: that and hit the material underneath. So you expose this
Speaker 1: combination to light. Typically these days we would use very
Speaker 1: powerful ultra violet light, and the light moves through those
Speaker 1: those patterns that the needle made on the lamp black
Speaker 1: and it then hardens that chemically treated material. Then you
Speaker 1: would use a special type of acid to dissolve some
Speaker 1: of the non hardened material. You end up with raised
Speaker 1: portions that represent the etchings that were on your glass master.
Speaker 1: You can then use that to create a mold and
Speaker 1: then you can start creating copies. But this method did
Speaker 1: not produce commercially viable results. Berliner realized that he was
Speaker 1: gonna need some other methodology to make stuff that was
Speaker 1: gonna be good enough to sell. So he then switched
Speaker 1: to a zinc disc and etching process that involved coding
Speaker 1: the zinc with a mixture of bees wax and cold gasoline.
Speaker 1: Believe it or not, he used a stylus attached to
Speaker 1: a diaphragm to etch the recorded sounds onto the coding.
Speaker 1: So again, you would make sounds into a trumpet. Those
Speaker 1: sounds would travel down the length of the trumpet, make
Speaker 1: a tiny membrane vibrate, and on the other end of
Speaker 1: the vibrante the vibrating membrane was a stylus that would
Speaker 1: rest against this coding and cause etchings to happen in it.
Speaker 1: He would actually coat the blank side of the disc
Speaker 1: with varnish. Now remember at this point records were one sided.
Speaker 1: They did not have grooves on both sides. One side
Speaker 1: was was completely smooth, and one side would have a
Speaker 1: recording on it. So the varnish would protect the blank
Speaker 1: side from what happens next, which was an acid bath.
Speaker 1: The acid would etch the lines made by the stylus
Speaker 1: into the grooves of the record. The rest of the
Speaker 1: disc would be still coated in bees wax mixture on
Speaker 1: that one side and varnish on the other, and thus
Speaker 1: they would remain unaffected by the acid. They would have
Speaker 1: this protective layer on top of them, so the result
Speaker 1: was a playable record. Unlike the wax cylinder devices which
Speaker 1: could be used to record or play back a cylinder,
Speaker 1: Berliner's method required two separate devices, one for recording and
Speaker 1: one for playback. The playback one was the gramophone, which
Speaker 1: had its own playback needle. The needle was attached to
Speaker 1: the speaker or trumpet of the gramophone via an arm,
Speaker 1: So you have an arm on the end of which
Speaker 1: is a needle. The other end of the arm moves
Speaker 1: into this trumpet. When you put the needle against one
Speaker 1: of these discs and it's rotating, the etchings on the
Speaker 1: disc would cause the needle to vibrate. The needle would
Speaker 1: transmit those vibrations through the arm of the device to
Speaker 1: a membrane connected to the trumpet, and then sound would
Speaker 1: emit from the trumpet and you would hear the playback.
Speaker 1: Berlinar would phase the zinc disks out in favor of
Speaker 1: vulcanized rubber disks, and then later on for discs that
Speaker 1: were essentially plastic. The discs had two big advantages over cylinders.
Speaker 1: They held together better for repeat playings, and they could
Speaker 1: easily be mass produced through pressings. You'd create a master
Speaker 1: recording on a special disc, you would make molds of
Speaker 1: that master recording, and then you would use blank discs
Speaker 1: and put those into the molds to create copies. So
Speaker 1: you could do this relatively quickly, especially compared to wax cylinders.
Speaker 1: Berliner built a prototype gramophone in eight and he demonstrated
Speaker 1: it at the Franklin Institute. The record he demonstrated was
Speaker 1: a seven inch disc, meaning it measured about eighteen centimeters
Speaker 1: across its diameter, and again it only had a recording
Speaker 1: on one side. The other side was smooth. The gramophone
Speaker 1: he used at that time was still a hand crank device.
Speaker 1: He had not yet worked with a machinist to create
Speaker 1: the spring motor version, and it was designed to rotate
Speaker 1: the disc thirty times per minute. That would end up
Speaker 1: changing as well, because again like the wax cylinders, these
Speaker 1: slower rotations meant that you had lower volume. As a result,
Speaker 1: the desk had a limit of about two minutes of
Speaker 1: recording on it. In that prototype. So you might ask
Speaker 1: yourself what was on that first disk during the demonstration, Well,
Speaker 1: it was it's hipped to be square by Huey Lewis
Speaker 1: and the News, which was a remarkable achievement because Huey
Speaker 1: Lewis wouldn't be born for another sixty two years. I'm kidding.
Speaker 1: I don't know what was on the disk. It was
Speaker 1: likely some sort of spoken word presentation. But I couldn't
Speaker 1: find an account of what was actually recorded on this
Speaker 1: demonstration disk. So if you happen to know what Emil
Speaker 1: Berliner recorded on his demonstration disc for the Franklin Institute,
Speaker 1: make sure you send me a message, because I couldn't
Speaker 1: find it. But he did make a deal with a
Speaker 1: German company called Camera and Reinhardt to produce a toy
Speaker 1: version of his invention for hand turned gramophone players. The
Speaker 1: company produced small runs of the device and disks, but
Speaker 1: it was really nothing more than a novelty at that point.
Speaker 1: So how did the gramophone find commercial success beyond that
Speaker 1: small market in Germany? And what did it have to
Speaker 1: do with the phonograph And how did this combined technology
Speaker 1: nearly die before it's time? Well, I'll answer all those
Speaker 1: questions in the next section, but first let's take another
Speaker 1: quick break to thank our sponsor. By Berliner was ready
Speaker 1: to take the next big step. First, he got some
Speaker 1: investment money from some New York backers and created the
Speaker 1: American Gramophone Company. This venture was a bit premature, and
Speaker 1: it failed to make any real progress. In fact, for
Speaker 1: a long time it was just lost to obscurity. No
Speaker 1: one even remembered it was a thing. It resurfaced only
Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties when a researcher named Raymond wild
Speaker 1: rediscovered evidence for it. But that failure did not stop Berliner.
Speaker 1: He then created the United States Gramophone Company, and his
Speaker 1: goal was to create commercial disc players for the average person.
Speaker 1: The first discs he tried to market were made from
Speaker 1: vulcanized rubber. A few of them were made out of celluloid,
Speaker 1: but that did not hold up very well, and by
Speaker 1: He then began to switch to a version that was
Speaker 1: made out of shellac compound to create the discs. It
Speaker 1: was harder, uh it was easier to work with in
Speaker 1: the vulcanized rubber. It's around this time that a machinist
Speaker 1: named Eldredge Johnson improved upon Berliner's design by adding that
Speaker 1: spring motor I had mentioned earlier to drive the turntable.
Speaker 1: That removed the necessity to hand crank the device, although
Speaker 1: you still had to wind up the motor. The commercial
Speaker 1: discs were meant to be played back at a speed
Speaker 1: of between sixty and seventy five repetitions per minute, with
Speaker 1: seventy being the most common speed. This kept the seven
Speaker 1: inch disks to about two minutes of music. Now, how
Speaker 1: could those speeds, which were faster, more than twice as
Speaker 1: fast than Berliner's prototype, hold that same amount of music
Speaker 1: as the prototype. Shouldn't they be able to hold less
Speaker 1: than that? If? If they're if they're traveling faster than
Speaker 1: the needle goes through the spiral faster? Right? What was?
Speaker 1: Because Berliner had refined the method of creating the spiral
Speaker 1: path on the discs, he was able to make those
Speaker 1: spirals tighter and maximize the amount of information he could
Speaker 1: store on a single side of a seven inch disc.
Speaker 1: So why those higher speeds? While I mentioned that the
Speaker 1: higher speed would produce more intense vibrations in the playback needle,
Speaker 1: which increased the amplitude of the sound wave, so again
Speaker 1: that was driven by necessity. There was no electronic amplification,
Speaker 1: so you had to rely upon physics just basic vibrations
Speaker 1: to create the sound, and you weren't really able to
Speaker 1: turn up the volume, so you had a consistent limitation
Speaker 1: on the amount of information you could put on a
Speaker 1: disk because the needle would travel the full length of
Speaker 1: the spiral groove in the disk in about two minutes.
Speaker 1: So how did the disk went out over the wax cylinder,
Speaker 1: which had already been on the market for a while.
Speaker 1: Several advantages helped seal the deal. First, wax cylinders were
Speaker 1: still pretty fragile. They would break after a few dozen playbacks.
Speaker 1: Typically that meant that you had to start all over again.
Speaker 1: You could create a new recording, but your old one
Speaker 1: was gone. They were also harder to store. The wax
Speaker 1: cylinders were more difficult to store safely. They took up
Speaker 1: more space, and you would have to put them in boxes,
Speaker 1: perhaps with additional protection around each cylinder if you wanted
Speaker 1: to make sure you weren't damaging them between playthroughs. There
Speaker 1: was no easy way to label the cylinders on the
Speaker 1: actual wax cylinder itself, which meant if you lost a label,
Speaker 1: like if you had a little container that the cylinder
Speaker 1: would sit in and somehow you lost the container. You
Speaker 1: would have no idea what was actually on that cylinder,
Speaker 1: and the only way to find out would be to
Speaker 1: insert it into a machine and started up to hear
Speaker 1: what was on there. And just that act would reduce
Speaker 1: the number of times you could listen to the wax
Speaker 1: cylinder because you're putting wear and tear on it. So
Speaker 1: cylinders were also more expensive because again they were harder
Speaker 1: to mass produce. In contrast, record desks were easy to store.
Speaker 1: You could up a label on each one, or you
Speaker 1: could stamp a label on each one at the center
Speaker 1: to indicate what was on the record, so you knew
Speaker 1: immediately whatever was recorded on the thing. They were easy
Speaker 1: to mass produce, which brought down the price and made
Speaker 1: it more economical than wax cylinders, and the early record
Speaker 1: discs were made out of pretty strong stuff, meaning they
Speaker 1: weren't likely to be damaged and they could withstand far
Speaker 1: more play throughs than a wax cylinder. Two other big
Speaker 1: elements helped make the gramophone and more importantly, the record
Speaker 1: disc a success. One was that Berliner wasn't just a
Speaker 1: keen inventor. He was a pretty astute businessman. In those
Speaker 1: early days, he had his United States Grammophone Company in
Speaker 1: d C. But he also licensed his designs to a
Speaker 1: group of entrepreneurs in Pennsylvania and they founded the Berliner
Speaker 1: Grammophone Company of Philadelphia. That group, in turn hired a
Speaker 1: man named Frank C. Man ce Man created the National
Speaker 1: Gramophone Company in New York. Now, manufacturing for the players
Speaker 1: mainly took place in d C and also a little
Speaker 1: bit in Philadelphia, as did the disc production. But these
Speaker 1: regional companies sort of acted as distributors for Berliner's technology,
Speaker 1: so there was no real easy way to get these
Speaker 1: inventions to other markets otherwise. Right, It's not like there
Speaker 1: were vast networks of stores that you could send these two.
Speaker 1: This is still in the days where the department store
Speaker 1: was starting to take form, but it was still pretty rare.
Speaker 1: You had a lot of dry goods stores and little
Speaker 1: tiny shops, so it was hard to get a national presence,
Speaker 1: and this was one way of doing it, was to
Speaker 1: create various companies that all would work together. By the
Speaker 1: late eight nineties, uh, the gramophone extended beyond the United States.
Speaker 1: The another trend that was helping drive that demand, So
Speaker 1: you had other countries suddenly saying hey, we want gramophones too,
Speaker 1: and that helped the economic output of this particular industry.
Speaker 1: But there was another thing that was a really important
Speaker 1: element that made the gramophone popular, and that was industrialization.
Speaker 1: With industrialization, people began to have more free time during
Speaker 1: a day because they used to have to work a
Speaker 1: full day. What what would be spent in labor all
Speaker 1: day long could now be spent, at least in part
Speaker 1: in leisure. You didn't have as many working hours because
Speaker 1: machines took a lot of the load off of you,
Speaker 1: so you didn't necessarily return home after twelve hours of
Speaker 1: work and then you ate something and then you collapsed
Speaker 1: in bed. Now you actually had a few extra hours
Speaker 1: to fill, and that created a demand for a whole
Speaker 1: new industry, the entertainment business. Gramophones met this demand allowed
Speaker 1: people to enjoy music or comedy, or even lectures if
Speaker 1: they wanted to, in their own homes, although in very
Speaker 1: short bursts because you were limited to about two minutes
Speaker 1: of recorded stuff per disk. Berliner's businesses went on to
Speaker 1: face copycats, two of which the company was able to
Speaker 1: shut down through legal moves, but the third, the Zona phone,
Speaker 1: represented a bit of a betrayal. Two executives who had
Speaker 1: been working at the National Gramophone Corporation, including Frank Cman,
Speaker 1: became executives of a competitor company called Universal Talking Machine Company,
Speaker 1: and they were still working for the National Gramophone Corporation.
Speaker 1: So the Berliner Company in Philadelphia took issue with this.
Speaker 1: They said, this is a conflict of interest. But the
Speaker 1: whole mess eventually went to the courts, and the court
Speaker 1: ultimately passed an injunction on the Berliner Gramophone Company that
Speaker 1: effectively shut them down. Berliner himself decided he wanted to
Speaker 1: get out of this cutthroat business and work on other things,
Speaker 1: so he eventually passed his patent rights on to the
Speaker 1: machinist Eldrich R. Johnson, that's the guy who created the
Speaker 1: spring motor for the early grammophone. Johnson would then go
Speaker 1: take the remains of the Berlinard Gramophone Company of Philadelphia
Speaker 1: and create a new company called the Victor Talking Machine
Speaker 1: Company Victor for short. Victor would become the biggest and
Speaker 1: most famous record company in the world. Over time. In
Speaker 1: the United States, people began to use the term phonograph
Speaker 1: or phonogram to refer to gramophones, the gramophone name itself
Speaker 1: began to fade from memory. In the United States and
Speaker 1: other countries, people still used gramophone to describe the disc
Speaker 1: based record machines, but in the US the gramophones old
Speaker 1: rival became the generic term for playback machines. However, the
Speaker 1: gramophone did lend its name to an award. The Grammys
Speaker 1: take their name from the Gramophone. One other thing Berlinard
Speaker 1: did that made a literal stamp on the record industry
Speaker 1: was the c ation of a registered trademark. While he
Speaker 1: was in London, Berlinard saw a painting that showed a
Speaker 1: small terrier sitting in front of a gramophone. The terrier's
Speaker 1: head is cocked a little bit to the side as
Speaker 1: it appears to listen to whatever was coming out of
Speaker 1: the gramophones trumpet. An English artist named Francis Barraud had
Speaker 1: painted this portrait, and he used his own dog, Nipper
Speaker 1: in the model. Berliner purchased a copy of this painting,
Speaker 1: brought it back over to the United States, and immediately
Speaker 1: applied to create a registered trademark for the image. Now,
Speaker 1: by the time he was granted this trademark, it was
Speaker 1: too late because the Berliner Gramophone Company of Philadelphia had
Speaker 1: the injunction against it, but he went on and passed
Speaker 1: the trademark on to Eldridge Johnson. So Eldridge Johnson made
Speaker 1: it the image for the Victor Record Company and they
Speaker 1: used it from that point forward, and the trademark has
Speaker 1: the well known name his Master's Voice. Oh and after
Speaker 1: all that, Berliner went on to develop other technologies like
Speaker 1: the helicopter, but that's a subject for another show. In
Speaker 1: Berliner's method was given additional credence because the Edison Company
Speaker 1: began to produce disc players and the Edison disc record
Speaker 1: At that stage, the records were still pretty short, their
Speaker 1: price had dropped, but something else was emerging that would
Speaker 1: nearly eliminate the market for the record player for the
Speaker 1: home consumer and also record discs for the home consumer.
Speaker 1: That's something that nearly wiped out the whole industry was radio. Now.
Speaker 1: I've talked about the history of radio before, about how
Speaker 1: people like Nicola, Tesla, and Marconi were instrumental in getting
Speaker 1: the technology out of the laboratory and into the real world.
Speaker 1: The Tesla Marconi story is another one filled with drama,
Speaker 1: as Tesla was originally granted patents in the US regarding
Speaker 1: radio in advance of Marconi, but then the Patent Office
Speaker 1: would eventually overturn Tesla's patents in faye for for the
Speaker 1: better connected Marconi's submissions. But we're not going to get
Speaker 1: into that story here. It is good to point out
Speaker 1: that Marconi's first demonstration of a wireless communications device took
Speaker 1: place on December twelfth, eighteen nine six. He used radio
Speaker 1: waves to send a signal across a room. Five years
Speaker 1: later he'd repeat that demonstration on a much grander scale
Speaker 1: by sending a radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean. But
Speaker 1: at that stage radio wasn't something the common person would
Speaker 1: ever have any experience with. The foundation for commercial radio
Speaker 1: was laid in nineteen o six on Christmas Eve, when
Speaker 1: Reginald Fastender sent a voice transmission across radio to wireless
Speaker 1: operators on board ships off the coast of New England.
Speaker 1: Up to that point, the only signals that had been
Speaker 1: sent via radio were the beeps of Morse code messages.
Speaker 1: Voice transmission created an entirely new opportunity. For the next
Speaker 1: decade and a half, radio was used for commerce and
Speaker 1: for experimental purposes, and some average citizens got to play
Speaker 1: with radio they became amateur radio operators HAM operators. When
Speaker 1: World War One broke out, it suddenly became very important
Speaker 1: to be able to produce radios in support of military efforts.
Speaker 1: So governments began to build out enormous manufacturing facilities or
Speaker 1: fund manufacturing facilities. Those all began staff by people. They
Speaker 1: learned how to make radios. They began to churn radios
Speaker 1: out for the military. But after the war was over,
Speaker 1: it meant that you had the building blocks for a
Speaker 1: brand new industry just waiting to happen. They could produce
Speaker 1: radios for the average citizen. In nine Dr Frank Conrad,
Speaker 1: who was an amateur radio enthusiast in Pittsburgh, had started
Speaker 1: to take to playing records over the radio for the
Speaker 1: entertainment of his fellow hobbyists. He got a message from
Speaker 1: the company Westinghouse. Now Westinghouse was in the business of
Speaker 1: making radios, and they wanted to nurture this potential new
Speaker 1: business of consumer radios. Together, Conrad and Westinghouse created the
Speaker 1: world's first commercial broadcast radio station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They
Speaker 1: received the designation k d k A, and it started
Speaker 1: broadcasting on November two, nineteen twenty, which was election Day
Speaker 1: in the United States. They chose that day because they
Speaker 1: figured they could actually broadcast the election results to listeners
Speaker 1: and beat out all the newspapers by spreading the word early,
Speaker 1: and that would cement how important the consumer radio would
Speaker 1: be as a viable product. It worked, and soon the
Speaker 1: radio became an incredibly popular piece of home entertainment technology.
Speaker 1: The radio gave listeners a chance to tune into totally
Speaker 1: different stations and get lots of different types of programming.
Speaker 1: Some of those stations would play music off of records. Well,
Speaker 1: that removed the necessity to have a home record player.
Speaker 1: There was no reason to have a phonogram in your
Speaker 1: house because you could just turn on the radio and
Speaker 1: listen to music that way for free. You purchased the radio,
Speaker 1: and once you've done that, you have access to all
Speaker 1: sorts of music, whereas if you bought a phonogram, you
Speaker 1: would still have to go out and buy the individual
Speaker 1: disks to listen to any sort of music. So a
Speaker 1: lot of people said, well, why do I want to
Speaker 1: do that? There's no reason, I'll just I'll just get
Speaker 1: my music now. If this sounds familiar, you might think, wait,
Speaker 1: that sounds a lot like the way music is today,
Speaker 1: whether you go out and you buy a digital album,
Speaker 1: or you even buy a CD or vinyl album, or
Speaker 1: you just stream music using a popular streaming service, similar
Speaker 1: to what was happening in the nineteen twenties. It was
Speaker 1: a time where people said, well, I could go and
Speaker 1: purchase all that music, or I can just listen to
Speaker 1: stuff over the radio. Now, granted it wasn't on demand
Speaker 1: like it is today with streaming. You were stuck with
Speaker 1: whatever the DJs would play for you, but same basic principle.
Speaker 1: The photograph industry faced a sharp decline once radio caught on,
Speaker 1: and it did not take long for radio to catch on.
Speaker 1: By nineteen twenty four, just four years after the first
Speaker 1: commercial radio station, there were more than six hundred commercial
Speaker 1: radio stations across the United States. So how did the
Speaker 1: phonogram make a return to popularity How did it become
Speaker 1: a home entertainment system again after the rise of radio.
Speaker 1: How did it avoid the fate of becoming a device
Speaker 1: just used by radio stations and no one else. We'll
Speaker 1: explore that in our next episode, So look forward to
Speaker 1: the next episode where we continue the story of the
Speaker 1: evolution of the turntable, how it became a staple piece
Speaker 1: of electronics in homes for many decades, how it then
Speaker 1: faded from popularity, and how it returned, as well as
Speaker 1: what the heck do all those do hickeys on a
Speaker 1: DJ's turntable? What do they do and how do they work?
Speaker 1: We're gonna cover all that in our next episode. I
Speaker 1: hope you guys enjoyed this one. If you have suggestions
Speaker 1: for future episodes, I'm doing a whole bunch of shows
Speaker 1: based off listener suggestions. I would love to see more
Speaker 1: of them. Send me an email. The addresses tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop
Speaker 1: me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of
Speaker 1: both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Head over
Speaker 1: to Instagram. We've got an Instagram account. Make sure you
Speaker 1: follow us there, and remember you can watch me record
Speaker 1: the show live on Wednesdays and Friday's at twitch dot
Speaker 1: tv slash tech Stuff. Just go to that U r L.
Speaker 1: You'll see the schedule there. I hope to see you
Speaker 1: over there in the chat room. I love to see
Speaker 1: listeners join in conversations over there. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of fun and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: For more on this and Bathans of other topics. Is
Speaker 1: it how staff works? Dot com