History of Sound

History of Sound 1

1820 to 1925

1820 Barrel organs bring mechanical music to the streets for the first time.

1871 Albert Hall opens

1875 -1876 Telephone

1877 Thomas Alva Edison, working in his lab, succeeds in recovering Mary's Little Lamb from a strip of tinfoil wrapped around a spinning cylinder. He demonstrates his invention in the offices of Scientific American, and the phonograph is born.

1878 The first music is put on record: cornetist Jules Levy plays "Yankee Doodle." Inspired by a visit to Edison's laboratories in Menlo Park, New Jersey, a prominent American mechanical engineer named Oberlin Smith conceived the idea of recording the electrical signals produced by the telephone onto a steel wire. He files a patent caveat but not a formal patent.  

1881 Clement Ader, using carbon microphones and armature headphones, accidentally produces a stereo effect when listeners outside the hall monitor adjacent telephone lines linked to stage mikes at the Paris Opera.

1887 Player pianos manufactured by Emil Welte. Straus, Mahler, Greig and many others record piano rolls.  

1887 The flat disc is designed by Berliner.  Emile Berliner is granted a patent on a flat-disc gramophone, making the production of multiple copies practical.

1888 Smith, deciding that he will not pursue his idea, "donates" it to the public by publishing his ideas about magnetic recording in the journal Electrical World

1888 Edison introduces an electric motor-driven phonograph.

1895 Marconi achieves wireless radio transmission from Italy to America. 

1898 Telegraphone, recording magnetically on steel wire, patented in Denmark by Valdemar Poulsen.