Norfolk Record Office

In the first part of the Story of Sound blog series, we travelled back in time to the late 1800s to discover who the first inventor was to create a machine which both recorded and played back sound, what the first recorded words were, and what common kitchen item was used as a component for the first ‘talking machine’. Find this blog post here. 

After Thomas Edison successfully developed the Phonograph in 1877, a machine which could both record and play back audio, he moved his attentions away to other areas of invention. However, his progress in the advances of recording sound did not go unnoticed, with other inventors picked up the baton including Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Tainter. The Phonograph, despite its success in both capturing and playing back audio, had its limitations. The design incorporated a recording cylinder covered in soft tin foil, onto which a stylus would imprint grooves as determined by the vibrations of the sound. However, the tin foil was frail, resulting in a poor sound quality when the audio was played back. Bell and Tainter resolved this by replacing the foil coating with wax. Their improvements to Edison’s design resulted in the development of their own machine, called the Graphophone. The potential held within these early machines ignited a competitive market, and, having successfully invented the first electric light bulb in 1887, Edison quickly rejoined the race to produce the most successful recording machine.

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