The Phonograph

Our assignment this week was to find a piece of equipment or technology that has furthered the making of music. I choose the record player, which is also known as a phonograph. I decided to choose a record player because without it we would have never have been able to record music and then play it back, and a world without music would be no world at all.Therefore I found out that the first record player was created in 1877 by Thomas Edison. He was the first one to be able to play sound back. Others such as, Alexander Graham Bell we able to record sound but were unable to play it back. At the time Edison was working on creating a phone and a telegram system but he jumped on and off of a lot of different projects.  His original phonograph had three parts a speaker containing a diaphragm attached to a scribing stylus, a four inch diameter metal drum attached to a hand crank and wrapped around with a toll of tinfoil, and the listening tube, very similar to the speaking tube, which contains a detecting stylus which is attached to the diaphragm. You would talk or sing into the diaphragm and the sound would vibrate, and the vibrations would record. The device could only record for three minutes though. The first thing every record on his device was him saying Mary had a Little Lamb. You can listen to his recording at - http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/edison/sfeature/songs/maryhadlamb.mp3 It is very short but think about how that is truly amazing it is compared to what we have now. The sound quality is also quite clear and pretty good compared to what we have now. If you are wondering what the first phonograph looked like you can look at the picture below.
This picture shows you all of the parts to the phonograph which I think is pretty awesome because it is amazing to look at how far technology has come. Just to show you how far we have advanced I wanted to show you two more photos, one of Edison's record player and one of a record player made recently.

Now of course Edison made the one on the left and the one on the right is a very modernized player but both do essentially the same thing. Except the more modern player only plays back music you cannot record on that device. Also the recordings that are made are put onto records and that is what the record player uses to make the sound. It is truly pretty extraordinary to see how far we have come. Think about it now me have devices such as the iPhone and iPod's that can both record music and play it back to us, and of course do so much more. Although if we are really going to record music we have to use different technology that would be found in a recording studio.

Citations

"Sound Recording: 1877 Edison Phonograph." -- Kids Encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Oct. 2013. <http://kids.britannica.com/elementary/art-90615/Thomas-Edisons-first-phonograph-recorded-sound-when-someone-spoke-into>.
“Thomas Alva Edison Patents the Phonograph." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 07 Oct. 2013. <http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/thomas-alva-edison-patents-the-phonograph>.
"Timeline of Thomas Edison's Life." PBS. PBS, 2000. Web. 07 Oct. 2013. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/edison/timeline/index.html>.