the.com/phonograph
Edison's machine that proved sound could be caged, copied, and outlive the throat that made it.
means An early device that records sound onto a rotating cylinder or disc and plays it back, the ancestor of every record player.
from From Greek phōnē 'sound, voice' (the same root behind 'phone' and 'symphony') plus -graphos 'writing,' from graphein 'to write' — so literally 'sound-writing.' The name fit a machine that scratched the vibrations of a voice into a physical groove, turning speech into something you could read back with a needle. The 'graph' suffix was a 19th-century favorite for new inventions (telegraph, photograph), and 'phonograph' slotted neatly into that family of Greek-built coinages.
- first words
- Edison recited Mary Had a Little Lamb
- name meaning
- Greek for sound-writer
- original purpose
- Edison pitched it for dictating letters
- tinfoil start
- First recordings etched on wrapped tin foil
- played backward
- Edison feared it would record the dying
edison cylinder phonograph — thomas edison's 1877 invention that first recorded and played back sound using tinfoil cylinders
victor talking machine — emile berliner's disc-based phonograph company founded in 1901, produced the famous nipper dog logo
gramophone — emile berliner's 1887 patent for a phonograph using flat discs instead of cylinders, commercialized worldwide