By Kelley-Anne
I was very fortunate
to be given the opportunity to check out some fascinating artifacts here at Lang Pioneer Village Museum. As I was searching, I came across what I believed
to be a record player that I found intriguing so I decided to go further into
research.
In 1877, Thomas
Edison invented the phonograph but it was only able to reproduce recorded sound
with the use of a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder and proved to be too
difficult for many people to use. Ten years later, in 1887, a German-born American
inventor named Emile Berliner built on the ideas of Thomas Edison’s design and
created the gramophone. He changed the tinfoil covered cylinder that was used to
produce sound to a device that was able to rotate a hard rubber disk on a flat
plate that could be turned by a crank to create sound. But as with the
phonograph, the gramophone could only play recordings, so in 1895 Berliner
established Berliner Gramophone Company, which not only produced gramophone
machines but records that could be played on them as well.
Obviously this isn’t
how the gramophones looked when they first came out- they would have been put
together properly and not have a coating of dust on them, though they are
still in great shape for having been around for more than 100 years.
Kelley-Anne is a grade 10 student at Trinity College School and guest writer for the Museum.
