HILDE HILDEBRAND ELECTROLA 3997 78 rpm phonograph record V+

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HILDE HILDEBRAND ELECTROLA 3997 78 rpm. V+, needs cleaning. No major scratches, but some greying


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WIKIPEDIA:

A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable,[a] is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.

The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison.[1][2][3][4] Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term gramophone for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, pickup system, and the sound and equalization systems.

The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio recording format throughout most of the 20th century. In the mid-1960s the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette tapes were introduced as alternatives. In the 1980s, phonograph use declined sharply due to the popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc, as well as the later introduction of digital music distribution in the 2000s. However, records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles, DJs, collectors, and turntablists (particularly in hip hop and electronic dance music), and have undergone a revival since the 2000s.

Contents

• 1 Terminology
  • 1.1 United Kingdom
  • 1.2 United States
  • 1.3 Australia
• 2 Early history
  • 2.1 Predecessors to the phonograph
  • 2.2 Phonautograph
  • 2.3 Paleophone
  • 2.4 The early phonographs
  • 2.5 Early machines
  • 2.6 Introduction of the disc record
  • 2.7 Oldest surviving recordings
• 3 Improvements at the Volta Laboratory
  • 3.1 Volta's early challenge
  • 3.2 Volta Graphophone
  • 3.3 Graphophone commercialization
• 4 Disc vs. cylinder as a recording medium
• 5 Dominance of the disc record
  • 5.1 First all-transistor phonograph
• 6 Turntable technology
  • 6.1 Turntable construction
  • 6.2 Turntable drive systems
• 7 Arm systems
  • 7.1 Linear tracking
• 8 Pickup systems
  • 8.1 Piezoelectric (crystal/ceramic) cartridges
  • 8.2 Magnetic cartridges
  • 8.3 Strain gauge cartridges
  • 8.4 Electrostatic cartridges
  • 8.5 Optical readout
• 9 Stylus
• 10 Record materials
• 11 Equalization
• 12 In the 21st century
• 13 See also
• 14 Notes
• 15 References
• 16 Further reading
• 17 External links

Terminology

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Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "record changer", although each of these terms denote categorically distinct items. When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, turntables are often colloquially called "decks".[5] In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record players or turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an analogous electrical signal by a transducer, then converted back into sound by a loudspeaker.[6]

Close up of the mechanism of an Edison Amberola, circa 1915

The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words φωνή (phonē, 'sound' or 'voice') and γραφή (graphē, 'writing'). The similar related terms gramophone (from the Greek γράμμα gramma 'letter' and φωνή phōnē 'voice') and graphophone have similar root meanings.[7] The roots were already familiar from existing 19th-century words such as photograph ("light writing"), telegraph ("distant writing"), and telephone ("distant sound"). The new term may have been influenced by the existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings.

Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice the word has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording, involving audio-frequency modulations of a physical trace or groove. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone", "Graphonole" and the like were still brand names specific to various makers of sometimes very different (i.e. cylinder and disc) machines; so considerable use was made of the generic term "talking machine", especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech, by simulating the workings of the vocal cords, tongue, and lips – a potential source of confusion both then and now.

United Kingdom

In British English, "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using disc records, which were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. Originally, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of that company and any use of the name by competing makers of disc records was vigorously prosecuted in the courts, but in 1910 an English court decision decreed that it had become a generic term;[8] it has been so used in the UK and most Commonwealth countries since.[citation needed] The term "phonograph" was usually restricted to machines that used cylinder records.

"Gramophone" generally referred to a wind-up machine. After the introduction of the softer vinyl records, 33+1⁄3-rpm LPs (long-playing records) and 45-rpm "single" or two-song records, and EPs (extended-play recordings), the common name became "record player" or "turntable". Often the home record player was part of a system that included a radio (radiogram) and, later, might also play audiotape cassettes. From about 1960, such a system began to be described as a "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) or a "stereo" (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s).

United States

Early phonograph at Deaf Smith County Historical Museum in Hereford, Texas

In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs[9]). "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but from about 1902 on, the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victrola (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were generally called "phonograph records" or simply "records", but almost never "Victrola records".

Boy and toy record player, 1920s

After electrical disc-playing machines appeared on the market in the late 1920s, often combined with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by the public. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were becoming popular as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers.

In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By the 1980s, the use of a "record changer" was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the present. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records".

Gramophone, as a brand name, was not used in the United States after 1902, and the word quickly fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Berliner Gramophone with a taper arm.

Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack for a magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input.

Australia

Wood engraving published in The Illustrated Australian News, depicting a public demonstration of new technology at the Royal Society of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) on 8 August 1878.

In Australian English, "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in British English. The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June 1878 to a meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year.[10] On 8 August 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione, along with a range of other new inventions, including the microphone.[11]

Early history

Predecessors to the phonograph

Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound, but were never sonically reproduced until 2008. Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the phonograph in 1877.

Dictionary illustration of a phonautograph. This version uses a barrel made of plaster of Paris.

Phonautograph

Main article: Phonautograph

Direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects such as tuning forks had been made by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807,[12] but the first known device for recording airborne speech, music and other sounds is the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by French typesetter and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. In this device, sound waves travelling through the air vibrated a parchment diaphragm which was linked to a bristle, and the bristle traced a line through a thin coating of soot on a sheet of paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder. The sound vibrations were recorded as undulations or other irregularities in the traced line. Scott's phonautograph was intended purely for the visual study and analysis of the tracings. Reproduction of the recorded sound was not possible with the original phonautograph.[13]

In 2008, phonautograph recordings made by Scott were played back as sound by American audio historians, who used optical scanning and computer processing to convert the traced waveforms into digital audio files. These recordings, made circa 1860, include fragments of two French songs and a recitation in Italian.[14][15]

Paleophone

Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute.[16]

Cros proposed the use of photoengraving, a process already in use to make metal printing plates from line drawings, to convert an insubstantial phonautograph tracing in soot into a groove or ridge on a metal disc or cylinder. This metal surface would then be given the same motion and speed as the original recording surface. A stylus linked to a diaphragm would be made to ride in the groove or on the ridge so that the stylus would be moved back and forth in accordance with the recorded vibrations. It would transmit these vibrations to the connected diaphragm, and the diaphragm would transmit them to the air.

An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure.[17] The author of this article called the device a phonographe, but Cros himself favored the word paleophone, sometimes rendered in French as voix du passé ('voice of the past').

Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception.[18]

Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45.[19]

The early phonographs

Patent drawing for Edison's phonograph, May 18, 1880

Thomas Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone.[20] His first experiments were with waxed paper.[21] He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878, as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..."[22]

Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph:

"I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible.

"From my experiments on the telephone I knew of how to work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such records to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice.

"Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of."

The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–2) of a similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct."[23]

The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at the Royal Society of Victoria, writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. "Rule Britannia" was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of "He's a jolly good fellow," which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a very cracked voice."[24]

Early machines

Phonograph cabinet built with Edison cement, 1912. The clockwork portion of the phonograph is concealed in the base beneath the statue; the amplifying horn is the shell behind the human figure.

Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil, which was temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings. While the cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis, the airborne sound vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation.[25]

Playback was accomplished by exactly repeating the recording procedure, the only difference being that the recorded foil now served to vibrate the stylus, which transmitted its vibrations to the diaphragm and onward into the air as audible sound. Although Edison's very first experimental tinfoil phonograph used separate and somewhat different recording and playback assemblies, in subsequent machines, a single diaphragm and stylus served both purposes. One peculiar consequence was that it was possible to overdub additional sound onto a recording being played back. The recording was heavily worn by each playing, and it was nearly impossible to accurately remount a recorded foil after it had been removed from the cylinder. In this form, the only practical use that could be found for the phonograph was as a startling novelty for private amusement at home or public exhibitions for profit.

Edison's early patents show that he was aware that sound could be recorded as a spiral on a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct".

Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated incised recording using wax-coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone.

Introduction of the disc record

The use of a flat recording surface instead of a cylindrical one was an obvious alternative which thought-experimenter Charles Cros initially favored and which practical experimenter Thomas Edison and others actually tested in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The oldest surviving example is a copper electrotype of a recording cut into a wax disc in 1881.

Cylindrical Dictaphone records continued in use until the mid-20th century. The commercialization of sound recording technology had been initially aimed at use in business correspondence, i.e. transcription into writing,[citation needed] in which the cylindrical form offered certain advantages. With paper documents being the end product, the cylinders were considered ephemeral; need to archive large numbers of bulky, fragile sound recordings seemed unlikely, and the ease of producing multiple copies was not a consideration.

In 1887, Emile Berliner patented a variant of the phonograph which he named the Gramophone.[b] Berliner's approach was essentially the same one proposed, but never implemented, by Charles Cros in 1877. The diaphragm was linked to the recording stylus in a way that caused it to vibrate laterally (side to side) as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc very thinly coated with a compound of beeswax. The zinc disc was then immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched a groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played. With some later improvements, the flat discs of Berliner could be produced in large quantities at much lower cost than the cylinders of Edison's system.

In May 1889, in San Francisco, the first "phonograph parlor" opened. It featured a row of coin-operated machines, each supplied with a different wax cylinder record. The customer selected a machine according to the title that it advertised, inserted a nickel, then heard the recording through stethoscope-like listening tubes. By the mid-1890s, most American cities had at least one phonograph parlor. The coin-operated mechanism was invented by Louis T. Glass and William S. Arnold. The cabinet contained an Edison Class M or Class E phonograph. The Class M was powered by a wet-cell glass battery that would spill dangerous acid if it tipped over or broke. The Class E sold for a lower price and ran on 120 V DC. The phenomenon of phonograph parlors peaked in Paris around 1900: in Pathé's luxurious salon, patrons sat in plush upholstered chairs and chose from among many hundreds of available cylinders by using speaking tubes to communicate with attendants on the floor below.

"I Am The Edison Phonograph" (2:23) Menu 0:00 This 1906 recording (with the character being voiced by Len Spencer) enticed store customers with the wonders of the invention.
2 minutes, 23 seconds. Problems playing this file? See media help.

By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon")[26] literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.)

Oldest surviving recordings

Lambert's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording,[27] although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial.[28] Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings,[29] until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a phonautograph recording of Au clair de la lune made on April 9, 1860.[30] The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact.[31]

A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one which is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned.[clarification needed] These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb, not preserved, has been called the first instance of recorded verse.[32] On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording.[33] Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th century media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst the earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present.[34][35]

Improvements at the Volta Laboratory

Main article: Volta Laboratory and Bureau § Sound recording and phonograph development

Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax.[36]

Although Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877 the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of sound recording. However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system.[36]

Volta's early challenge

Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after his invention of the telephone. According to Sumner Tainter, it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate.[36]

In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the phonograph, and it was agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, which resulted in the selenium-celled Photophone.

Volta Graphophone

See also: Graphophone A 'G' (Graham Bell) model Graphophone being played back by a typist after its cylinder had recorded dictation.

By 1881, the Volta associates had succeeded in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used. Rather than apply for a patent at that time, however, they deposited the machine in a sealed box at the Smithsonian, and specified that it was not to be opened without the consent of two of the three men.

The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph."[37] Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables.[36]

One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell. Tainter was granted U.S. Patent 385,886 on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch.[36]

The preserved Bell and Tainter records are of both the lateral cut and the Edison-style hill-and-dale (up-and-down) styles. Edison for many years used the "hill-and-dale" method on both his cylinders and Diamond Disc records, and Emile Berliner is credited with the invention of the lateral cut, acid-etched Gramophone record in 1887. The Volta associates, however, had been experimenting with both formats and directions of groove modulation as early as 1881.

The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus.[36]

Graphophone commercialization

A later-model Columbia Graphophone of 1901 Play media Edison-Phonograph playing: Iola by the „Edison Military Band“ (video, 3 min 51 s)

In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886, and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone.[36]

After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace.[38] The Volta Graph

Emma Minna Hilde Hildebrand was a German actress born in Hanover, Germany on 10 September 1897. She died at the age of 78 in Grunewald, Berlin, on 27 May 1976.

Hilde Hildebrand's grave at the Friedhof Heerstraße in Berlin in 2006.

Selected filmography

• 1920: Die Scheidungsehe (Short)
• 1921: Der Herr Papa - Else
• 1922: Es bleibt in der Familie (Short) - Schauspielerin Molly
• 1922: Schwarzwaldkinder - Liesbeth, Tochter von Nikodemus Grieshaber
• 1922: Lohengrins Heirat - Elsa
• 1922: Hotel zum goldenen Engel - Ella
• 1922: Der Herr Landrat - Molli Jolli
• 1925: The Dealer from Amsterdam - Susi
• 1928: Sechs Mädchen suchen Nachtquartier
• 1928: Der fesche Husar - Vilma von Noszty
• 1928: Rasputins Liebesabenteuer - Dirne Gregubowa
• 1931: Meine Frau, seine Frau (Short)
• 1931: Different Morals - Cora Petry
• 1931: The Fate of Renate Langen - Marion
• 1931: Arme, kleine Eva! - Erna Steindamm
• 1931: Panic in Chicago - Susy Owen
• 1931: The Little Escapade - Lona Wernecke, seine Frau
• 1931: Robby geht los - Olga Loty
• 1931: Madame Makes Her Exit - Eva - die Freundin
• 1931: My Leopold - Rosita
• 1931: Der unbekannte Gast - Ita Hanna
• 1932: The Ladies Diplomat - Olga seine Frau
• 1932: The Beautiful Adventure - Frau de Serignon
• 1932: Strafsache van Geldern
• 1932: Drei von der Kavallerie - Lola von Heldburg
• 1932: Ballhaus goldener Engel
• 1932: The Importance of Being Earnest
• 1932: When Love Sets the Fashion - Suzanne
• 1932: Impossible Love - Frl. Martini
• 1933: Ein Lied für Dich
• 1933: Moral und Liebe - Lissy
• 1933: Manolescu, der Fürst der Diebe - Marion Lamond
• 1933: Jumping Into the Abyss - Eva Volkmann
• 1933: Greetings and Kisses, Veronika - Klara Becker, seine Frau
• 1933: D. K. 1 greift ein - Olly
• 1933: Wege zur guten Ehe - Eugenie von Bergen, die nymphomanische Frau
• 1933: Love Must Be Understood - Ellen Parker, seine Braut
• 1933: Keine Angst vor Liebe [de] - Frau Bobrinski
• 1933: Gretel Wins First Prize - Gerda, seine geschiedene Frau
• 1933: Viktor und Viktoria - Ellinor
• 1934: My Heart Calls You - Margot
• 1934: Pipin der Kurze [de] - Rita, Schauspielerin
• 1934: Little Dorrit - Lily, seine Tochter
• 1934: Polish Blood - Wanda Kwasinskaja
• 1934: The English Marriage - Bella Amery
• 1935: Peter, Paul and Nanette - Mary
• 1935: Ein falscher Fuffziger - Frau Strachwitz
• 1935: Barcarole - Ludovisca
• 1935: Artisten - Vera Leander
• 1935: Amphitryon - 1. Freundin Alkmenes
• 1935: The Private Life of Louis XIV - Duchesse de Montespan
• 1935: The King's Prisoner - Fräulein von Mallwitz
• 1935: I Was Jack Mortimer - Daisy
• 1935: His Late Excellency - Baronin v. Windegg
• 1936: The Czar's Courier - Zangara, Ogareff's mistress
• 1936: Die letzte Fahrt der Santa Margareta - Miß Mabel Glann
• 1936: Tomfoolery - Aimée
• 1936: Fräulein Veronika - Dora
• 1936: Maria the Maid - Actress Alice Winter
• 1936: Kinderarzt Dr. Engel - Mutter eines Kindes im Krankenhaus
• 1936: Madona in Warenhaus
• 1937: Mother Song - Ricarda Doret, seine Frau
• 1938: Es leuchten die Sterne - Singer
• 1938: The Girl of Last Night - Lady Darnmore
• 1938: Der Tag nach der Scheidung - Susi Lang
• 1938: Tanz auf dem Vulkan [de] - Gräfin X
• 1939: The Green Emperor - Nora
• 1939: Bel Ami - Clotilde von Marelle
• 1939: Silvesternacht am Alexanderplatz - Madeleine
• 1939: Parkstraße 13 - Baronin Bornegg
• 1939: Marriage in Small Doses - Frau Conradi
• 1939: Das Glück wohnt nebenan
• 1940: Frau nach Maß - Hermine Campe
• 1940: My Daughter Doesn't Do That - Sängerin
• 1940: Der Kleinstadtpoet - Lona Elvira
• 1941: Alarm - Pensionsinhaberin Frau Anders
• 1941: Jenny und der Herr im Frack - Lilly Hegedüsch
• 1942: Die heimlichen Bräute - Daniela Dannenberg Sängerin
• 1943: Reise in die Vergangenheit - Lily, Carlos Frau
• 1943: Die schwache Stunde - Roxy
• 1944: Spiel
• 1944: Große Freiheit Nr. 7 - Anita
• 1944: Spiel mit der Liebe
• 1944: Ich bitte um Vollmacht - Sängerin Daniela Dannberg
• 1945: The Appeal to Conscience
• 1947: Ghost in the Castle - Camilla
• 1948: Der Herr vom andern Stern [de] - Jeanette
• 1949: The Appeal to Conscience - Meta Puchalla
• 1949: Kätchen für alles - Maria
• 1949: Das Gesetz der Liebe [de] - Signora Rinuccini
• 1949: Kleiner Wagen – große Liebe
• 1950: Schuß um Mitternacht - Schauspielerin Elvira
• 1950: Verlobte Leute - Frau Rehbein - die Portiersfrau
• 1950: The Orplid Mystery - Mrs. Eleanor Hoopman
• 1950: Glück muß man haben [de] - Mademoiselle Yvonne
• 1951: The Tiger Akbar - Madame Regina, Kunstreiterin
• 1951: Immortal Light - Madame de Latour
• 1951: The Guilt of Doctor Homma - Frau Burde
• 1954: She - Nachbarin
• 1955: The Three from the Filling Station
• 1956: Pariser Geschichten
• 1957: Weekend (TV film)
• 1958: César (TV film) - Honorine, Fannys Mutter
• 1958: Colombe (TV film) - Madame Alexandre
• 1959: The Abduction of the Sabine Women (TV film) - Friedrike Gollwitz
• 1959: Adorable Arabella - Lady Bridlington
• 1960: Carnival Confession - Mme. Guttier
• 1961: Einladung ins Schloß (TV film) - Madame Desmermortes
• 1962: Nicht zuhören, meine Damen! (TV film) - Julie Bille en Bois
• 1962: Überfahrt (TV film) - Mrs. Cliveden-Banks
• 1963: Three Penny Opera [de] - Mrs. Celia Peachum
• 1963: Heiraten ist immer ein Risiko (TV film) - Lydia Barbent
• 1964: Bis ans Ende (TV film) - Agatha Payne
• 1969: Katzenzungen (TV film) - Tante Fini
• 1971: Der Kommissar: Der Moormörder (TV series episode) - Frau Steger