History of the Phonograph: From Soot Tracings to Hip-Hop Turntables

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The earliest known recording of a human voice was made in 1860, almost two decades before Thomas Edison, by a Parisian typesetter who never meant anyone to hear it. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville built a mechanical ear from a funnel, a membrane, and a boar's bristle that scratched sound waves into lampblack. He wanted to see sound, not replay it. His tracing of the folk song Au Clair de la Lune stayed silent until 2008, when scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scanned it and converted the line to audio.

This episode follows the phonograph from that soot-covered cylinder through a century and a half of rivalry and engineering. Edison's tinfoil machine began as a telegraph side project and was abandoned for five years. Alexander Graham Bell's wax cylinders and Emile Berliner's flat discs fought the first format war. Later came the physics of tonearms and styli, the direct drive motor that turned a playback device into an instrument, and a vinyl revival nobody predicted.

• In April 1877 the French poet Charles Cros described the paleophone, an etched groove a needle could retrace, but he lacked the money to build it and sealed the idea in an envelope.
• Edison tested his first phonograph by shouting Mary Had a Little Lamb, and the tinfoil tore after three or four plays.
• Because wax cylinders could not be duplicated, George Washington Johnson sang The Laughing Song thousands of times, sometimes 50 times in a day, into banks of machines.
• Flat discs sounded worse than cylinders at first but won because a single master could stamp hundreds of shellac copies an hour.
• The Technics SP-10 of 1969 and the later SL-1200 gave DJs instant torque for scratching, and the Library of Congress now reads broken discs optically through a project called IRENE.