Exploring

Inherent Vice: Early Sound Recordings

This early tin foil phonograph recorded onto a cylinder covered with tin foil.
Edison National Historic Site, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior

Before the advent of magnetic tape (and later, compact disc), sound recordings were made by picking up sound vibrations and transmitting them to a stylus, which etched them into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc. The earliest recordings were acoustic, which, in simple terms, means that changes in air pressure were channeled through a horn to a diaphragm attached to the stylus and thus transformed into mechanical motions. Later recordings (after about 1925) used microphones, which transformed the changes in air pressure into changes in electrical voltage, which in turn made the stylus move.

The first phonograph, which recorded onto cylinders and played back the recordings, was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. Emilie Berliner patented the Gramophone (which used a disc instead of a cylinder) in 1887, and in 1892 he began producing discs commercially. Both types of machines were sold commercially until the early 1920s, but discs soon surpassed cylinders in popularity. Commercially recorded cylinders were discontinued in 1929, but cylinder recorders were still used at least through the 1940s for live recording of ethnographic field notes and for office dictation.

These types of recordings are not as common in cultural collections as magnetic tapes, but discs, in particular, are encountered fairly frequently.