[IP Encyclopedia] The Beginning Of Pop Music Edisons IP Phonograph

Phonograph [Photo provided : imagetoday]

Patent Application : Phonograph (US227679A)

Year : 1880

Nation : the USA

Location : Menlo Park New Jersey

Name : Thomas A. Edison

At the height of the digital age most of todays popular music is being consumed as streaming services rather than records. Only ten years ago listening to music through CD was common and as we trace back further there was an LP generation and the culture of popular music began after this music storage machine was developed. In todays IP Encyclopedia lets take a look at the origin and related patents of Edisons Gramophone which announced the beginning of the pop music era basing on Record and Disk.

Recording sound is too easy with the current technology but it was very difficult when it was tried for the first time. Now with only turning on your phone and pressing a button recording is able but the early version of the so-called ‘Record technology was a method to physically record sound waves.

Thomas Edison who was working for Western Union a telegraph company in 1877 became interested in the fact that the telegraph transmission sounds like music while trying to speed up the transmission of information. After that he worked hard to develop a device that records and converts regular vibrations into sound.

It is a method of converting sound into mechanical vibration and recording the vibration in a tin foil by cutting a groove in it. And on the contrary when playing recorded sounds the recorded sound is heard by placing a needle in the groove in the tin foil and turning it. The first recorded song was Mary Has A Little Lamb a childrens song sung by his friends.

Edison immediately succeeded in filing a phonograph patent (US227679A) in 1880 under the title ‘Phonograph’. The round disc and needle show that it is very similar to the early model of LP. Of course the early recording method developed by Edison was not enough to mass-produce.

Ten years later it was improved to a lead pipe phonograph using a lead tube that can record sound more faithfully and easily. Since then Graham Bells Institute improved Edisons gramophone and developed a Graphophone which uses a waxed cylinder instead of tin as a sound storage medium.

Disk type and cylindrical type began competition. At the Handel Festival at Crystal Palace in London in 1888 as Handels Oratorio Israel in Egypt was recorded with Edisons phonograph a great possibility of storing sound and selling it as a product appeared.

Emile Berliner the inventor of Hannover who saw the potential of the record market founded American Gramophone Company in Washington USA invested in record production and sales and began to win a huge success. It was a company that played a big role at that time in introducing European artists to the United States and American artists to Europe.

Since then the first British recording company EMI was established in 1898 and in 1903 at RCA legendary tenor Enrico Carusos album exceeded 1 million copies which contributed to the great development of the market. The music business which began with classical music gradually began to contain various genres of music.

At that time there were two types of famous phonographs cylindrical and disc-shaped. From the 1890s to the 1920s the cylindrical phonograph and disc-type phonograph in the United States competed fiercely in the market and from the 1930s the disc-type phonograph became the winner of the market with low prices and active marketing.

The history of the music industry fired by Edisons phonograph. From a generation listening to music with a phonograph to an CD player and now entering the digital age we are in the era of MP3 players and mobile phone streaming. All of this started with the phonograph the device that stores sound. I cant help but think that Edisons influence is really great. What path will the music industry take in the future? I wonder how far Edisons influence will continue.

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