History - Text 3
These instruments and systems, conceived in laboratories, would be adopted for other applications: to record and reproduce speech and music. In the home, the phonograph and the gramophone let people hear famous, much-loved and imitated voices which only a few initiates could go and applaud live in theatres, music halls, cabarets, etc.
Of course the technical elements and the materials varied (paper, glass, celluloid, discs, arc lamps, acetylene lamps, hydrogen gas lamps), but most mechanical systems to come out of these experiments in the nineteenth century pertain to three fundamental concepts: (1) transporting sound, a millennial dream achieved by recording devices (essentially based on the graphic method, and later the photographic method); (2) distance transmission (telephone, telegraph, microphone, theatrephone); and (3) the reproduction of sound (Thomas Edison’s cylinder phonograph in 1878 and Emil Berliner’s disc gramophone in 1887).
