Many years ago, people already knew how to write the spoken words on papyrus, parchment or paper. However, the years passed, and there was a need to preserve for posterity not just letters and numbers, but real live sound, music, song, dialogue, which, of course, is very noticeably different from written speech, even the most beautiful one.
Phonograph - "mechanical beast"
It was the first device in the world capable of not only recording sounds, but also playing back what was recorded. American inventor Thomas Edison received a patent for it on February 19, 1878, but for the first time he presented his amazing apparatus to the public six months earlier. In a phonograph, the sound was fixed with a membrane and a needle on a wax roller (later on aluminum foil) in the form of a track, the depth of which depended on the strength of the sound. And during playback, the same needle, moving along the groove, transmitted vibrations back to the membrane - and people heard what was applied to the roller. The very first phonograph recording was a children's song Mary Had a Little Lamb ("Mary had a lamb").
Edison's invention amazed the public in all countries where it was demonstrated. But sometimes the demonstrations were accompanied by scandals. So, at the French Academy in Paris, the phonograph was presented to scientists by one of the engineers of Edison's company. When a human voice suddenly rang out from a tin box, professor-philologist Jean Bouillard, who was present in the hall, pounced on the engineer and began to strangle him, repeating: “Scoundrel! Dodger! Do you think that we will let the ventriloquist cheat us ?!"
Later, Bouillard said: "Is it possible to assume that the despicable metal is able to reproduce the noble voice of man!"
And when the phonograph was first publicly shown in Russia, the owner of the "talking mechanical beast" was brought to trial and eventually sentenced to three months in prison and a heavy fine for "fraud." Only thanks to the intervention of technical specialists, the owner of the ill-fated device was still acquitted, but by that time he had already served his term in prison.
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Gramophone and gramophone
In 1887, the inventor Emil Berliner proposed recording sound not on rollers, as Edison did, but on flat discs, and soon received a patent for both such an apparatus and the disc itself. At the same time, Berliner called his device a "gramophone". It is in the form of discs that the carriers of the recorded sound have safely survived to this day. For more than 100 years, only the material from which the familiar records were made has changed.
The world's first gramophone record was zinc. The sound track was applied to it according to the same principle by which the phonograph worked: through a membrane with a needle. Then, when the disc rotated by means of a spring mechanism, the gramophone needle moved in a spiral and caused the plate to vibrate, which reproduced the recorded music or song. But at the same time, the gramophone had a huge advantage over the phonograph - it used a transverse sound recording, and not a deep one. Thanks to this, the distortions in the gramophone record were ten times less, moreover, this method provided a louder sound. And if we add to these advantages the ease with which it was possible to replicate records with songs and music, then the victory of the gramophone over the phonograph looks quite natural. Already in 1904-1906, the mass production of gramophones,as well as records for them became a powerful independent industry in the USA and Europe, and a little later - in Russia.
In 1907, the "Pate" company improved the gramophone by integrating a sound-reinforcing cone into the lid of the box in which the apparatus was located. The new device was called a gramophone. It was no longer necessary to attach the former bulky bell to it, and in order to listen to the recording, it was enough just to open the lid, twist the knob and lower the needle onto the rotating disc.
Shellac Plates
To get better and better sound from media, process engineers around the world tested a variety of materials from which to make gramophone discs. In a sharp competition, the German company Odeon was ahead of everyone. In 1903, in 1903, for the first time, gramophone records made of a new material called shellac, based on natural resin obtained from the elytra of a tropical beetle of the worm family, became the basis for widespread sale. At the same time, the Odeon company began to apply sound recording tracks not on one, but on both sides of the rotating disc. Thus, the buyer for almost the same price purchased from the company not one, but two sound recordings at once. In addition to their two-sidedness, shellac plates favorably differed from similar products of competing firms by their increased strength,and also a low price. These advantages subsequently made it possible for gramophone records from this material to dominate the world recording market for half a century. It was only in the early 1950s, when vinyl was invented, that shellac records began to gradually give way to sound discs made of new material in home music libraries.
Sounding "time capsule"
An unusual ceremony took place on December 24, 1907 in the basement of the Paris Opera building. Here, the laying of the so-called "time capsules" - sealed vessels, into which were placed 24 gramophone records with audio recordings of famous singers and musicians of that time, took place. The idea of putting "living voices" in "time capsules" belonged to Alfred Clark, director of the French branch of the British company Gramophone (later it became known as EMI).
Among the stored records, in particular, were the song “How the King Went to War” performed by Fyodor Chaliapin, “Zapateado” by Pablo Sarasate, played by the Czech violinist Jan Kubelik, recordings of the voices of Enrico Caruso and other celebrities of the late Belle Époque (“Belle Epoque , The conventional name for the time between the last decades of the 19th century and 1914 in Europe, mainly in France). The capsules were ordered to be removed to descendants after 100 years, which was done on December 19, 2007.
Specialists have removed the fragile contents from glass-asbestos packaging, which protected it a hundred years ago. The extracted recordings from the 78mm track were optically read and rewritten in a digital storage format, after which they were posted on the Internet.
Aprelevskaya factory
In Russia, the first factory of gramophone records was opened on September 1 (14), 1910 in the village of Aprelevka near Moscow. It was co-owned by a German businessman Gottlieb Moll and his son Johann. Later, the enterprise was named "Aprelevskiy gramophone record plant". In the very first year, 400 thousand discs were released here under the Metropol and Record brands, which were sold in a matter of weeks. After the revolution, the enterprise was nationalized, and on the records of those years there was an image of a swallow holding a golden note sign in its beak, which became the plant's emblem.
In 1964, the Melodiya recording company was created in the USSR, which included the Aprelevsky plant. Up to 60% of all records produced in the USSR were produced here. But after the start of the mass production of tape cassettes, the circulation of vinyl discs began to fall. In 1991, when the Aprelevka plant produced about 33 million records, it was already working at a loss. The last batch of vinyl discs here was released in 1997.
Vinyl discs
In June 1948, the American record company Columbia Records presented its first vinyl LPs to the public, each side of which could record 23 minutes of sound. Thus, the company made a real revolution in the music industry. Before that, for 50 years, the recording market was dominated exclusively by shellac records, which rotated at a speed of 78 revolutions per minute, and therefore it was impossible to record a piece of music longer than four minutes on each side of the disc. By replacing shellac with more plastic vinyl, Columbia was able to reduce the rotational speed of the record to 33 rpm and thereby increase the recording time. In addition, vinyl made gramophone discs unbreakable, that is, almost forever. It was the biggest sensation in the worldafter which all competitors of the American company were instantly far behind it in the music services market.
Magnetic recording
Already in the 1950s, in many countries around the world, devices that reproduced sounds from a magnetized carrier went on free sale. At the same time, with the help of a tape recorder, it was possible to make sound recordings no longer in the factory, but at home, which contributed to their rapid spread in any country. This is how the appearance of magnetic tape on the wide market marked the "beginning of the end" of the recording, which until then reigned supreme in the world for nearly 100 years.
Valery EROFEEV