Coll" href="/text/category/koll/" rel="bookmark">record collection. These rare things are the pride of our museum. In addition, the gramophone is in working condition and can play records. It was made at the Leningrad Gramophone Plant The year of manufacture is unknown, but according to external characteristics, most likely it is the mid-20th century.
From the history of the creation of the gramophone
In 1877, the outstanding American inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Alva Edison designed a device for mechanical recording and reproduction of sound - the phonograph. Our grandfathers used phonographs until the 30s. And in 1888, the German E. Berliner invented the miracle of the century - the gramophone, and the era of mass culture began. It was the gramophone that became the progenitor of the gramophone.
An employee of the French company Pathé, Guillon Kemmler, improved the gramophone in 1901. By making the horn (the large outer tube of the apparatus) of the gramophone small, he built it inside the body of the gramophone, designing the new apparatus to be compact, small-sized and portable. The word gramophone combines two words. “Pate” is a famous French company for the production of gramophones, and the word “von”, which translated into Russian means “sound”. It is believed that gramophone is an incorrect name for gramophone, which took root only in the USSR and is not even known for what reasons. The gramophone is for us part of Soviet culture.
The gramophones of that time were mechanical and were driven by a spring. One plant was enough to listen to one side of the record. This device did not require connection to an electrical outlet. They danced to it on the playgrounds in the parks. The sound was quite loud. The volume level was not adjustable. Several types of gramophones were produced.
The entire device fit into a relatively light, compact suitcase. You could take it with you and even hold it in your arms, unlike gramophone, which was stationary.
The sound from the record was recorded using a sapphire stylus. This stylus was designed for repeated use, unlike the gramophone steel stylus, which was changed after 3-4 minutes, which corresponded to listening to only one side of the record. There is one more nuance - all gramophone records play from the center to the edge, and gramophone records from the edge to the center, and it is impossible to listen to a gramophone record on a gramophone, and vice versa. The gramophone's case has a pull-out compartment for storing needles, which could be purchased by weight. They were cheap.
https://pandia.ru/text/78/636/images/image004_22.jpg" alt="D:\Photos\_DSC0570.JPG" align="left" width="697" height="462 src=">Первые пластинки назывались !} records(from the English word "record" - "record"). They were thick, with a rough edge and weighed almost half a kilogram! Two holes were made in the center. The record occupied only one side (double-sided “records” appeared only in 1903); on the other side the title of the record was printed along with the libretto or sample sheet music.
The very first recording in Russian was made in 1897 in Hanover. And what weren’t the first records made from! Made from wax, celluloid, rubber, metal and even... chocolate. Yes, yes, real chocolate! At the beginning of the century, such “delicious” records were sold - first you could listen to them and then eat them, probably if you didn’t really like the recording.
All these materials were generally not suitable for records. Here's the thing. The length of the sound groove of just one song was about a kilometer. While the needle ran this path, it pressed on the bottom of the groove with incredible force - about a ton per square centimeter! This is about the same as placing an elephant on one leg on a matchbox. What material can withstand such pressure? Probably steel? No, records made from the best steel wear out 20 times faster than those made from shellac.
Shellac? And what is it? In India there is a tiny bug - the varnish bug. It secretes a resin from which it makes itself a shell (shell in English is “shell”, hence shellac). It turned out that this resin can be melted, mixed with other substances, and subjected to pressure - it will still remain elastic and at the same time hard. Its only drawback is its high cost. After all, to make just one plate, the shells of 4 thousand bugs were required. This resin was torn from the tree bark, doused with hot water, washed, and filtered to remove pieces of bark.
It’s clear that you can’t make many records this way. Therefore, already in 1908, manufacturing companies began to buy old, unusable, broken records. Announcements of the following kind were printed: “For three old records, one new one of the same size is issued, subject to the purchase of one more new one.”
It was necessary to replace the resin with something. Came to the rescue plastic. The dense surface of the plastic made it possible to bring together and narrow the sound grooves - a long-playing record appeared.
The ambassadors of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who arrived in Baghdad, were amazed. In the caliph's palace there stood a giant fabulous tree, the trunk and branches of which were made of silver, the leaves were made of gold, and birds made of precious metals and stones sat in the crown of the trees. And what was most amazing was that these birds chirped in every way, like real ones! This was a thousand years ago. But our distant ancestors have probably made attempts to reproduce human speech and music since they began to think about the tricky question: what is an echo?
When mechanics began to flourish, skilled craftsmen created many wonders, such as a mechanical scribe.
They sat him down at the table, brought him in, and he started writing! He dipped his pen in ink, shook it off the pen, wrote letters and words on paper, and even followed what was written with his eyes. And of course, among these toys there were many musical ones. In front of the most common musical instrument of the era, a machine was placed in the shape of a person and dressed in the latest fashion. But the main thing in a self-playing instrument is music, and it’s not always worth making a complex and expensive robot musician, especially in life-size. When the masters realized this truth, they began to design robots that did not resemble humans. So almost 300 years ago in Italy a musical instrument appeared for those who... can’t play. You just need to turn the handle. Most often the popular melody of that time was “Lovely Katarina”, in French “Charman Catherine”. The name of the instrument comes from the name of this song - the barrel organ. But it, like all kinds of jukeboxes and mechanical pianos, played one melody. And there were so many wonderful and different sounds around. How to save them?
Phonograph. End of the 19th century
Today, even a small child is not surprised that his favorite fairy tale is “told” by a small black disk. But how many years have people dreamed about this? “Sound does not disappear without a trace, it can be somehow preserved,” this assumption was made by the physicist Porta in 1589. In 1807, another physicist, Jung, for the first time managed to put the trace of a sounding tuning fork on smoked paper.
Phonograph "Talking Doll". End of the 19th century
Another half a century has passed - the French typesetter Scott creates a “soundautograph”. This device could imprint on the sensitive layer of a rotating roller the “character” of any sound.
And finally the memorable year 1877 came - the famous American inventor T. Edison invented a device that he called a phonograph. This is how he himself recalled it: “Once, when I was working on improving a telephone, I somehow sang over the telephone’s diaphragm (a thin steel plate) to which a needle was soldered. Thanks to the vibration of the record, the needle pricked my finger, which made me think. If it were possible to record these vibrations of the needle, and then move the needle again over such a recording, why wouldn’t the record speak? That’s the whole story: if I hadn’t pricked my finger, I wouldn’t have invented the phonograph!”
Probably, not everything is as simple and accidental as Edison said. If he had not invented the phonograph, someone else would have invented it. But Edison knew how to notice everything very well and think about facts and phenomena that many passed by without paying attention. It turns out that sometimes it’s good to prick your finger and think!
To be fair, it must be said that the principle of recording and reproducing sound was discovered and described by the French poet and scientist Charles Cros almost a year earlier than Edison. However, while the sealed envelope with a description of the paleophone (as Cro called his invention) lay in the office of the French Academy, the practical and businesslike Edison filled out an application for a phonograph.
Sticker for a gramophone record from the early 20th century.
The slowness of the “immortals” (as members of the academy were called in France) cost the country priority in the invention of sound recording.
So, December 1877. Thomas Alva Edison recites a short nursery rhyme about Mary and her little sheep through the mouthpiece of an outlandish apparatus. And a minute later, the amazed assistants hear the device repeating a simple story in the voice of the inventor. Miracle? None of Edison's contemporaries doubted this.
So many people came to see and listen to the “talking machine,” as soon as the evening newspapers reported on it, that additional trains had to be run on the line leading to Menle Park, where the inventor lived and worked. Somewhat later, the phonograph was shown in circuses, passing it off as an “inexplicable mystery of nature.” But what did the phonograph look like? Imagine a thick cylinder with a handle. This is a phonograph roller. It was wrapped in foil or wax-coated paper. The person spoke or sang, and the roller was rotated at the same time. And a needle attached to the membrane scratched a groove on it. Then the needle was moved to the beginning of the groove, the handle was turned again - and the voice sounded.
Gramophone. Beginning of the 20th century
Just such a phonograph was demonstrated in March 1878 at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. The device obediently reproduced the phrase recorded on the roller. And suddenly Academician Buyo, who was present at the meeting, rushed at Edison’s representative and grabbed him by the throat, shouting loudly: “Scoundrel, we will not allow some ventriloquist to fool us!”
After listening to the explanation of a physicist who proved that sound in a phonograph is produced by the vibration of a metal membrane, Buyo angrily replied: “I will never admit that the noble sound of a person’s voice can be replaced by a piece of iron!”
Buyo was not alone in his mistrust. Two years later, in 1880, the French physiologist Fallier wrote about the phonograph: “People admire the phonograph and believe that anyone can hear the voice of any famous actor or famous singer at his own discretion. However, all this is completely unusual fantasy!
With the help of a phonograph it was possible to make one single recording, and this, naturally, is not very convenient. Therefore, the phonograph is the “progenitor”, and the gramophone should be considered the “father” of the modern player. It was first demonstrated 11 years after Edison’s invention by the German engineer Emil Berliner, who worked in America. True, at first the new product did not arouse much interest, and even the insightful Edison said: “This is a machine without a future.” Berliner proposed recording sound on a zinc disk coated with a thin layer of wax, and then making copies of it into records. To listen to records, he invented a device he called a gramophone. The gramophone turned out to be much more convenient than the phonograph, and in the end people preferred it. True, this predecessor of our stereo systems was not particularly beautiful. The disk was rotated manually. The needle with the membrane moved from the center of the plate to the edge. The belt drives of the open mechanism were complemented by a large horn. But it was possible to make any number of copies-records from the original recording.
Gramophone. Mid-20th century
The gramophone was a huge success. By 1907, in Russia alone, “about half a million gramophones were in use,” reported the magazine Gramophone News. Quite a lot! Especially when you consider that the first factory-made gramophones appeared in our country in 1897 and cost a huge amount of money at that time - 80, 100 and even 600 rubles!
If we could bring together all the models of gramophones, the collection would be very interesting. You would see shelves, cabinets, jugs, vases, barrels, chests, caskets-houses, caskets-cars... You would even see lions with open mouths here.
“Do you need volume? If you please!” - and the buyer was offered a triplophone - a three-sound gramophone that had three horns, three membranes and three discs.
“At the end of the last century, the fabulous dream of the famous Arab sheikh and philosopher Abd al-Kader came true, who in 1301 told his students that lying is one of the greatest vices. It will disappear only when people learn to turn their every word into stone, which will serve as evidence against a liar,” was the promising statement that opened the chapter “Gramophones” in one of the popular science books published in 1915.
A coin-operated automatic player that allowed you to choose to listen to any of 20 records. First half of the 20th century
But, despite the high prices and variety of forms, the sound of gramophones left much to be desired. Constant attempts were made to improve the apparatus: the membrane alone had more than 500 modifications. The needles used were either diamond or bamboo, sometimes with a thickening at the bottom, sometimes with a sharp bend, and even with a spring around it. The needle was already moving from the edge to the center.
In 1907, the French company of the Pathé brothers opened a factory in Moscow that produced absolutely extraordinary gramophones. Their membrane was located not vertically, but horizontally in relation to the disk, which had truly gigantic dimensions - half a meter in diameter! From these devices, one name soon remained - gramophone, which passed on to devices of a more advanced design. They turned from a singing cabinet into a small square box, then into a portable suitcase, incorporating a wide bell - a mouthpiece, which was ridiculed more than once in the newspapers. This is how older people remember the gramophone - the youngest and most common model of the Berliner gramophone.
Today's stereo systems satisfy the requirements of the most demanding music lovers. Pickups with piezoelectric, corundum and diamond stylus handle records very delicately. Players with laser sound reading are becoming increasingly popular.
Along with the gramophone, the records also changed. The first records were called records (from the English word “record”). They were thick, with a rough edge and weighed almost half a kilogram! Two holes were made in the center. The record occupied only one side (double-sided “records” appeared only in 1903); on the other side the title of the record was printed along with the libretto or sample sheet music. And what weren’t the first records made from! Made from wax, celluloid, rubber, metal and even... chocolate. Yes, yes, real chocolate. At the beginning of the century, such “tasty” records were sold - first you could listen to them and then eat them (probably if you didn’t really like the recording).
All these materials were generally not suitable for records. Here's the thing. The length of the sound groove of just one song was about a kilometer. While the needle ran this path, it pressed on the bottom of the groove with incredible force - about a ton per square centimeter! This is about the same as placing an elephant on one leg on a matchbox. What material can withstand such pressure? Probably steel? No, records made from the best steel wear out 20 times faster than those made from shellac.
Shellac? And what is it? In India there is a tiny bug - the varnish bug. He secretes a resin from which he makes himself a shell (shell - shell in English, hence shellac). It turned out that this resin can be melted, mixed with other substances, and subjected to pressure - it will still remain elastic and at the same time hard. Its only drawback is that it is very expensive. After all, to make just one plate, the shells of 4 thousand bugs were required. This resin was torn from the tree bark, doused with hot water, washed, and filtered to remove pieces of bark. It’s clear that you can’t make that many records. Hence the high price. Therefore, already in 1908, manufacturing companies began to buy old, unusable, broken records. Announcements of the following kind were printed: “For three old records, one new one of the same size is issued, subject to the purchase of another new one.”
It was necessary to replace the resin with something. Chemistry did it. Polyvinyl chloride mixed with vinylite - records are mainly made from these plastics today. The dense surface of the plastic made it possible to bring together and narrow the sound grooves - a long-playing record appeared.
Why do traditional gramophone records still remain popular, despite the rapid onslaught of tape recorders? The secret is simple: they guarantee higher sound quality. This position is being strengthened by new records being released in a number of countries. They have a number of unusual properties. Firstly, they are extremely durable. Such a record can be thrown with force onto the floor, pounded with heels - nothing will happen to it. Secondly, these records are only 12.5 centimeters in diameter, but each side plays for an hour, i.e. the recordings on them are very compact, hence the name “compact disc”. Thirdly, the sound on these records was recorded using sophisticated electronic devices.
And this is precisely where the main novelty lies - the role of a pickup for such a record is played by a laser beam, which does not damage the record at all, no matter how many times it is played. Even if the record is dirty or covered with a thick layer of dust, the laser beam provides clear sound.
The inventive human mind has come up with a new entertainment - fragrant discs. When played, they fill the room with various aromas. There are now more than 40 different scents to choose from. The owner of the player and discs can only decide where he wants to be - on the seashore or in front of a burning fireplace, or maybe in the forest after the rain.
Do you know?
When and where was the very first recording in Russian made?
In 1897 in the city of Hanover.
In the display cases of the exhibition, located in the music library hall, you can see old gramophone records, a roller from a Welte-Mignon mechanical piano, photographs of the first phonographs and ancient gramophones, and portraits of the inventors of sound recording. Above the display case there are signs telling the history of recording in Russia.A Brief History of Sound Recording in Russia
The principle of recording a sound wave was first described by the French poet, musician and amateur inventor Charles Cros in 1877, but it did not come to the construction of the apparatus, which he called the “autographic telegraph”. Thomas Edison made the same discovery in 1878, independently of Charles Cros' invention. He was the first to build a device and called it a “phonograph.”
The phonograph came to Russia almost immediately after its invention by Edison. Thanks to the phonograph, recordings of the playing of S. I. Taneyev, Anton Rubinstein, the boy virtuoso Jascha Heifetz, young Joseph Hoffmann, the voices of L. N. Tolstoy, P. I. Tchaikovsky, A. I. Yuzhin-Sumbatov and many other historical figures were preserved.
The phonograph did not disappear with the invention of the gramophone in the 1880s. It was readily used by ordinary people for many years, until the end of the 1910s.
However, the phonograph had the disadvantage that its recordings existed in only one copy.
Only ten years after the advent of the phonograph, in 1887, the German engineer Emil Berliner invented a device that recorded sound not on a roller, but on a record. This opened the way for mass production of gramophone records. Berliner called his device “gramophone” (“I write sound”). It took a long time to search for material for gramophone records and to determine the speed of rotation that would not distort the sound. Only in 1897 did they settle on a disk made of shellac (a substance produced by a tropical insect - the varnish bug), spar and soot. This material was quite expensive, but a replacement came with the invention of hard plastics in the 1940s. And the rotation speed of 78 rpm was determined by 1925.
Berliner's invention gave birth to a real gramophone boom. Recording came to Russia from abroad, and until 1917, gramophone production was in the hands of foreigners.
The first company to enter the Russian market was the company of Emil Berliner himself - "Gramophone Berliner", in Russia simply "Gramophone". The company's factory brand - "Writing Cupid" - has become very popular in Russia. Almost simultaneously, the German company International Zonophone, or simply Zonophone, began operating in the northern capital. In 1901, the Parisian firm Pathé Brothers opened a store on Nevsky Prospekt. In the late 1890s, recordings by M. G. Savina, F. I. Shalyapin, V. F. Komissarzhevskaya appeared on the St. Petersburg market...
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first gramophone factory in Russia appeared. It opened in Riga in 1901. And in 1902, the Anglo-German-American Gramophone Society, with the participation of St. Petersburg engineer Vasily Ivanovich Rebikov, founded the first gramophone and gramophone record factory in St. Petersburg. Rebikov's factory produced up to 10 thousand records per year and made up to 1000 recordings per year, mainly of the Russian repertoire: the choir of A. A. Arkhangelsky, the orchestra of V. V. Andreev, the orchestra of the Life Guards Regiment of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, folk performers, St. Petersburg singers and artists: bass M. Z. Goryainov, tenor N. A. Rostovsky, actor N. F. Monakhov, singer Varya Panina.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, St. Petersburg companies recorded the voices of singers I.V. Ershov, N.N. Figner, N.I. Tamara, I.A. Alchevsky, choirs and orchestras, and many foreign guest performers. In 1907, the Pathé Brothers company began selling “gramophones” in St. Petersburg - portable (“portable”) gramophones.
In addition to gramophone recording, there was mechanical recording of sound. These are mechanical pianos. Recording in them was made using a special mechanism on paper tape - punched tape. The patent for this invention was first taken out in 1903 by Edwin Welte in Freiburg (Germany). He called the device "Welte Mignon". Soon a similar device from Fonola appeared. From 1904 until the outbreak of the First World War, several thousand rolls were recorded, capturing the art of musicians from different European countries. Recordings were made of Anna Esipova, Alexander Scriabin, Alexander Glazunov, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and many others. At the same time, two significant mechanical recording production facilities were created in the USA - “Duo Art” and “Ampico”. Sergei Prokofiev, Joseph Levin, Alexander Ziloti recorded on them. Mechanical notation remained popular with pianists until the early 1930s.
The music library contains gramophone records from almost all companies operating in St. Petersburg - "Gramophone", "Zonofon", "Telefunken", "Columbia", etc., including those with the trademark "Writing Cupid", "Voice of the Master", "Decca" .
At the end of the 1920s. Electrical recording was invented, which enormously expanded the capabilities of the recording industry. The quality of recordings has improved dramatically. Electrical recording is not yet as perfect as electronic or later digital recording, but it is already far superior to Berliner's electromechanical recording.The record libraries of records from the first Soviet factories of the 1920s and 30s: Gramplasttrest (with the SovSong trademark), Aprelevsky, Muzprom, stored in the funds, are of particular value. These records were created using electric recording techniques. In those years, unique recordings of the voices of many Russian artists were made, concerts of musicians, orchestras, choirs, and opera performances were recorded.
Electronic recording was invented in the late 1940s. This, as well as the creation of hard plastics, made it possible to launch the production of long-playing records during these years.
Digital recording emerged in the late 1950s.
In the late 1980s, with the advent of computer sound media, gramophone records began to fall out of use. Digital technology, the advent of CDs and DVDs, seemed to have displaced the gramophone record from the world market. However, experts soon came to the conclusion that digital sound recording has a number of disadvantages and does not allow one to fully reproduce all the colors and all the features of musical sound. At the end of the 1990s, many foreign companies returned to the production of records and electronic players. This industry is still developing today. Recording technology has, of course, improved since the 1950s. New foreign-made records appeared in the 1990s on the Russian market.
The Russian National Library's music library also has some of them.
Who and when invented the first gramophone?
Century 17. France.
The beginning of the birth of devices for playing melodies, and then records, is considered to be the end of the 17th century. It was at this time that France threw a box on the counter of the music world. A box inside which were placed in several rows of sounding pipes, bellows and a wooden or metal roller with pins. One piece at a time was “recorded” onto the roller. It was a mechanical instrument in the form of a small organ without a keyboard. It first appeared as a tool for training songbirds and was called "Orgue de Barbaris". At the end of the nineteenth century it was improved, the rollers were replaced with perforated circles and several songs, waltzes or operas were already recorded. This instrument was given the simpler name of a barrel organ - from the opening line of the German song "Scharmante Katarine".
Katarina. Edison.
The barrel organ, or popularly known as Katarinka, lasted until 1877. Until the restless old man Edison
(On February 19, 1877, the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison received patent number 200,521 for a device he created that was capable of recording and reproducing live human voice and music. This device became known as a phonograph)
did not expose the phonograph to the listener. A device for mechanically recording sound and, most importantly, reproducing it. Edison showed everyone how, using a needle and foil, he squeezed out a screw groove of variable depth, and then began to move the needle along the groove. It's finished! It performs forced vibrations and the membrane associated with it produces sound. So, the direct path to real turntables was begun.
With great hindrance, only after 1920 all sorts of discoveries rained down like from a cornucopia. The gramophone and gramophone were created on the basis of the phonograph.
Gramophone and gramophone.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the gramophone was invented, a mechanical-acoustic device, a more serious device for playing music than the previous ones. It was from him that the clear, independent reproduction of sound from gramophone records began (see DJ culture from October 2000). Well, since it’s more serious, it means it’s also more cumbersome. And here, as always, new scientists are on hand, coming up with new inventions.
They invent a portable, portable type of gramophone with a hidden horn - a gramophone. The first gramophones were produced by the French company Pathé. However, they were very different in design from the devices commonly known by that name. They were adapted not only for playback, but also for recording sound; recording and playback were carried out not from the edge of the record to the center, but from the center to the edge, etc. The peak of popularity occurred in the 40s of the outgoing century.
After the advent of long-playing “gram records,” gramophones gradually went out of use, giving way to the electrophone (electric record player) and radio tape.
Inventor: Emil Berliner
A country: USA
Time of invention: 1887
Not least among the remarkable technical achievements of the 19th century is the invention of sound recording. The first device that could record sound was created in 1857 by Leon Scott.
The principle of operation of his phonautograph was very simple: a needle, which transmitted vibrations of the sound diaphragm, drew a curve on the surface of a rotating cylinder covered with a layer of soot. The sound waves in this device received a kind of visible image, but nothing more - it is clear that it was impossible to reproduce the sound recorded on soot.
The next important step on this path was taken by the famous American inventor Edison. In 1877, Edison created the first “talking machine” - a phonograph, which made it possible not only to record, but also to reproduce sound.
Edison spoke about his invention like this: “Once, when I was still working on improving the telephone, I somehow sang over the diaphragm, to which a steel needle was soldered. Thanks to the vibration of the records, the needle pricked my finger, and this made me think. If it were possible to record these vibrations of the needle, and then move the needle again over such a recording, why wouldn’t the record speak?
I first tried to pass an ordinary telegraph tape under the tip of a telephone diaphragm and noticed that it turned out to be some kind of alphabet, and then, when I forced the recording tape to pass under the needle again, I thought I heard, albeit very faintly: “Hello, hello.” Then I decided to build a device that would work clearly, and gave instructions to my assistants, telling them what I had come up with. They laughed at me."
The principle of the phonograph was in general terms the same as that of the telephone. Sound waves were driven using a speaking tube to a plate of very thin glass or 
mica and a cutter attached to it were recorded on a rapidly rotating shaft covered with tin foil. The foil produced traces, the shape of which corresponded to the vibrations of the plate and, consequently, to the sound waves incident on it. This strip of sheet tin could be used to produce the same sounds on the same device.
With uniform rotation of the strip, the cutter attached to the plate passed along the groove it had previously made. As a result, the plate was driven by the cutter into the same vibrations that it had previously transmitted to it under the influence of the voice and sound instrument and began to sound like the membrane of a telephone. Thus, the phonograph reproduced every conversation, singing and whistling.
Edison's first devices, created in 1877, were still very imperfect. They wheezed, nasalized, overly amplified some sounds, did not reproduce others at all, and in general, looked more like parrots than loudspeakers of human speech. Another disadvantage was that the sound could only be heard by placing the ear to the diaphragm. This was largely due to the fact that the roller did not move smoothly enough over the surface, which could not be made completely smooth. The needle, moving from one recess to another, experienced its own vibrations, transmitted in the form of strong noises.
Edison worked hard to improve the phonograph. He encountered especially many problems with playback 
the sound “s”, which did not want to be recorded. He himself recalled later: “For seven months I worked almost 18-20 hours a day on one word “spice”. No matter how many times I repeated into the phonograph: spice, spice, spice - the device stubbornly repeated to me the same thing: spice, spice, spice. You could go crazy! But I did not lose heart and persistently continued my work until I overcame the difficulties. How difficult my task was, you will understand if I say that the marks made on the cylinder at the beginning of the word were no more than one millionth of an inch in depth! It is easy to make amazing discoveries, but the difficulty is to improve them so that they have practical value.
After many experiments, a more or less suitable material for rollers was found - an alloy of wax and 
some vegetable resins (Edison kept this recipe secret). In 1878, he founded a special company for the production of phonographs. At the same time, wide advertising of his invention was launched in all newspapers. They assured that the phonograph could be used for dictating letters, publishing audio books, playing music, learning foreign languages, recording telephone messages and many other purposes.
But, alas, none of these promises were fulfilled even in 1889, when a new phonograph was designed that did not have many of the disadvantages of the previous one. However, the new improved phonograph did not receive widespread practical use. In addition to the high price, its distribution was hampered by practical imperfections. The roller couldn't hold much information and took a few minutes to fill up.
More or less significant correspondence required a large number of rollers. After several listenings, the copy was destroyed. The transmission of the device itself was far from perfect. In addition, it was impossible to make copies from the wax roller. Each recording was unique and if the roller was damaged, it was lost forever.
All these shortcomings were successfully overcome by Emil Berliner, who in 1887 took out a patent for another sound recording device - the gramophone. Although the principle of the gramophone and phonograph was the same 
and the same gramophone had a number of significant differences, which ensured its widest distribution. First of all, the needle in Berliner's recording apparatus was positioned parallel to the plane of the diaphragm and drew sinuous lines (not grooves, like Edison's). In addition, instead of a bulky and inconvenient roller, Berliner chose a round plate.
The recording proceeded as follows. A polished zinc disk intended for sound recording was installed on a large-diameter disk with a side. A solution of wax in gasoline was poured on top of it. The disk-tub received rotation from the handle through a friction transmission, and a system of gears and a lead screw connected the rotation of the disk with the radial stroke of the recording membrane mounted on the stand.
This achieved the movement of the recording device along a spiral line. When the gasoline evaporated, a very thin layer of wax remained on the disc, and the disc was ready to be recorded. Berliner made the sound groove in almost the same way as Edison, using a recording membrane equipped with a tube with a small horn and transmitting its vibrations to an iridium tip.
The main advantage of recording using the Berliner method was that it was possible to easily obtain 
copies. To do this, the recorded disc was first immersed in an aqueous solution of chromic acid. Where the surface of the disc was covered with wax, the acid had no effect on it. Only in the sound grooves, since the recording tip cut the wax all the way to the surface of the disc, the zinc was dissolved by the acid. In this case, the sound groove was etched to a depth of about 0.1 mm. The disc was then washed and the wax removed. In this form, it could already serve to reproduce sound, but in fact it was only an original for the production of copper galvanic copies.
The principle of electroforming was discovered in 1838 by the Russian electrical engineer Jacobi. In progress 
electrolytes were used - liquids that conduct electric current through themselves. A feature of electrolytes is that in solutions (or melts) their molecules break up into positive and negative ions. Thanks to this, electrolysis becomes possible - a chemical reaction that occurs under the influence of electric current.
To carry out electrolysis, metal or carbon rods are placed in the bath and connected to a constant current source. (The electrode connected to the negative terminal of the battery is called the cathode, and the electrode connected to the positive terminal is called the anode.) The electric current in the electrolyte represents the process of movement of ions to the electrodes. Positively charged ions move towards the cathode, and negatively charged ions move towards the anode.
At the electrodes, a reaction occurs to neutralize ions, which, by giving up extra electrons or receiving missing ones, turn into atoms and molecules. For example, each copper ion receives two missing electrons at the cathode and is deposited on it in the form of a metal 
copper In this case, the deposit gives an accurate relief image of the cathode. This last property is precisely what is used in galvanoplasty.
A copy (matrix) is made of the copied objects, representing their reverse negative image. The copy is then suspended as the cathode (negative pole) in the plating bath. The metal from which the copy was made is taken as the anode (positive pole). The bath solution must contain ions of the same metal.
Berliner acted in exactly the same way - he immersed a zinc disk in a bath of copper salt solution and connected the negative pole of the battery to it. During the electrolysis process, a layer of copper 3-4 mm thick was deposited on the disk, exactly repeating all the details of the disk, but with a reverse relief (that is, tubercles were obtained in place of the grooves, but exactly repeating all their twists).
The resulting copper copy was then separated from the zinc disk. It served as a matrix with which it was possible to press discs-plates from some plastic material. In the beginning, celluloid, ebonite, all kinds of wax masses and similar substances were used for this purpose. The very first gramophone record in history was made by Berliner in 1888 from celluloid.
Gramophone records that went on sale in the early 90s were made of ebonite. Both of these 
The materials were not suitable for the intended purpose, since they were poorly pressed and therefore did not accurately reproduce the matrix relief. Having carried out many experiments, Berliner in 1896 created a special shellac mass (it included shellac - a resin of organic origin, heavy spar, ash and some other substances), which then remained for many decades the main material for making records.
The records were played on a special device - a gramophone. The main part of the sound pickup device here was a mica plate, linked by a lever with a clamp into which replaceable steel needles were inserted. Rubber gaskets were placed between the clamp and the membrane body. Initially, the gramophone was driven by hand, and then began to be mounted on a box with a mechanism.
Both the recording device and Berliner's first gramophones were very imperfect. Hissing, crackling and distortion were their constant companions. Nevertheless, this invention was a huge commercial success - in just ten years, gramophones spread throughout the world and penetrated into all levels of society. By 1901, about four million records had already been released. Phonographs could not compete with Berliner's creation, and Edison had to curtail their production.
