For the purposes of introduction, the gramophone and the phonograph have been considered a single invention since the former evolved out of the latter to eventually replace it. Both were inscribing, groove based systems.

The gramophone/ phonograph was the keystone innovation on which the record industry was invented.

A good place to begin an exploration of the technological development of the record and the industry it spawned is in the early 1860s.

This was when a Frenchman named Leon Scott, working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts), came up with a device called a phonautograph for tracing vocal patterns.

A thin hog’s bristle quill was attached to the centre of a compliant diaphragm at the back of a tapered horn that concentrated the sound. The other end of the quill was a sharp fine point.

A piece of smoked glass would travel past the point as a sound entered the horn causing a wavy line that corresponded to the sound vibrations to be scratched into the soot.

A later version of the device positioned the stylus against a cylinder of heavy paper coated with soot. The cylinder was rotated by hand, and if someone shouted into the horn, an image of the vibrations were captured on the paper.

There was no provision to manufacture Leon Scott’s device as it was not a marketable product aside from its scientific applications, but it did point the way towards later invention.

In 1877 a French inventor, Charles Cros, proposed the Phono-Graphos. He never had the money to build his idea, but it was much closer to what would become the gramophone. Cros described a method for recording on a round flat glass plate.

He also suggested a means of playback. Like Scott, Cros failed to commercialize his idea because he could not see a wide market for the Phono-Graphos.

By the 1860s, telegraph and Morse code had become widely used. Two major problems were that the messages could not be stored and they could not be transmitted very far without requiring the weak signal to be listened to, copied and repeated by an operator.

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