Recordings-lecture

Before iTunes, Spotify, and Pandora something had to come first. Before radio became the beginning of all the current music apps, we had recordings.  In 1877, Thomas Edison was the first to have a way to reproduce the sound in a physical form.  The phonograph was like a tinfoil cylinder that had little indentions that when scratched produced the sound that was recorded in it.  The invention was great but had some flaws in its design.  One was that you couldn't make copies of the specific recording, which kept his invention from becoming mass communication.  Another issue was the material of the cylinder, tinfoil, it was a thin sheet that when played many times began to fall apart.  Tin foil is a fragile metal and if the cylinder was not taken care of began to weather away.  So 10 years after Thomas Edison, Emile Berliner created the Gramophone, which instead of being a fragile roll, was a metal disk.  Unlike Edison's one time deal Berliner could reproduce the sounds made from the original copy to mass produce the sound.  Then about 40 years later this invention continued to grow and eventually became electric.  Microphones and speakers enabled people to communicate a message to a large audience in a small area. This invention started the future of sound and paved the way to new technology such as radios and TVs.