US Patent: 227,679
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| Phonograph
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Patentee:
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| Thomas Alva Edison (exact or similar names) - Menlo Park, NJ |
| Manufacturer: |
| Not known to have been produced |
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Patent Dates:
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| Applied: |
Mar. 29, 1879 |
| Granted: |
May 18, 1880 |
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Jeff Joslin
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Description: |
| This is the original Edison patent for the phonograph, the first successful method to record and play back audio. The editors of Scientific American reported that on December 6th 1877, a man, Thomas Edison, came to their office with a machine, and when he turned a crank on this machine, it spoke. This was both literally and figuratively, a sensation. Word of this invention spread quickly, and established Edison as a "wizard" and inventor. However, Edison's phonographic recordings, which used a cylinder coated in tin foil, were fragile and offered poor sound quality. Edison switched his attention to other inventions. In 1886 Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Sumner Tainter, and Chichester Bell perfected a phonograph that used a wax-coated cylinder as the recording medium, and this proved to be far superior. Their "Graphophone" technology would be licensed for Edison's Improved Phonograph. In 1887 Emil Berliner patented his Gramophone, which used a flat disc rather than a cylinder. One major advantage of the disc is that unlike cylinder recordings they could be mass-produced by stamping, and another advantage is that they could hold several minutes of recordings compared to the maximum of about two minutes on the cylinder devices then available. It was the Victor Talking Machine Company that would set the standard for the recording medium with their 78 RPM rubber or shellac discs. |
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