By: Emily Meinzer The History of Audio

1877: Thomas Edison 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: Jules Levy’s “Yankee Doodle”.

1881: Clement Ader, using carbon microphones and armatures headphones, accidentally produces a stereo effect when listeners outside the hall monitor adjacent telephone lines linked to stage mikes at the Paris Opera. 1887: Emile Berliner is granted a patent on a flat- disc gramophone, making the production of multiple copies practical.

1888: Edison introduces an electrical motor-driven phonograph. 1895: Marconi successfully experiments with his wireless telegraphy system in Italy, leading to the first transatlantic signals from Poldhu, Cornwall, UK to St. Johns, Newfoundland in 1901.

1898: Valdemar poulsen patents his “Telegraphone,” recording magnetically on steel wire. 1900: Poulsen unveils his invention to the public at the Paris Exposition. Austria’s Emperor Franz Josef records his congratulations. Boston’s Symphony Hall opens with the benefit of Wallace Clement Sabine’s acoustical advice.

1901: The Victor Talking Machine Company is founded by Emile Berliner and Eldridge Johnson. Experimental optical recordings are made on motion picture film Lee Deforests invents the triode vacuum tube, the first electronic signal amplitier.

1910: Enrico Caruso is heard in the first live broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, NYC. 1912: Major Edwin F. Armstrong is issued a patent for a regenerative circuit, making radio reception practical. 1913: The first “talking movie” is demonstrated by Edison using his Kinetophone process, a cylinder player mechanically syncronized to a film projector.

1916: A patent for the super heterodyne circuit is issued to Armstrong. The Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) is formed. Edison does live-versus-recorded demonstrations in Carnegie Hall, NYC. 1917: The Scully disk recording lathe is introduced. E. C. Wente of Bell Telephone Laboratories publishes a paper in Physical Review describing a “uniformly sensitive instrument for the absolute measurement of sound intensity”- the condenser microphone.

1919: The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) is founded. It is owned in part by United Fruit. 1921: The first commercial AM radio broadcast is made by KDKA, Pittsburgh, PA. 1925: Bell Labs develops a moving armature lateral cutting system for electrical recording on disk. Concurrently they Introduce the Victor Orthophonic Victola, “credenza” model. This all-acoustic player—with no electronics—is considered a leap forward in phonograph design. The first electrically recorded 78 rpm disks appear. RCA works on the development of ribbon microphones.