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History of Sound In Chronological Order

History of Sound 1

1820 to 1925

1820 Barrel organs bring mechanical music to the streets for the first time.

1871 Albert Hall opens

1875 -1876 Telephone

1877 Thomas Alva Edison, working in his lab, succeeds in recovering Mary's Little Lamb from a strip of tinfoil wrapped around a spinning cylinder. He demonstrates his invention in the offices of Scientific American, and the phonograph is born.

1878 The first music is put on record: cornetist Jules Levy plays "Yankee Doodle." Inspired by a visit to Edison's laboratories in Menlo Park, New Jersey, a prominent American mechanical engineer named Oberlin Smith conceived the idea of recording the electrical signals produced by the telephone onto a steel wire. He files a patent caveat but not a formal patent.  

1881 Clement Ader, using carbon microphones and armature headphones, accidentally produces a stereo effect when listeners outside the hall monitor adjacent telephone lines linked to stage mikes at the Paris Opera.

1887 Player pianos manufactured by Emil Welte. Straus, Mahler, Greig and many others record piano rolls.  

1887 The flat disc is designed by Berliner.  Emile Berliner is granted a patent on a flat-disc gramophone, making the production of multiple copies practical.

1888 Smith, deciding that he will not pursue his idea, "donates" it to the public by publishing his ideas about magnetic recording in the journal Electrical World

1888 Edison introduces an electric motor-driven phonograph.

1895 Marconi achieves wireless radio transmission from Italy to America. 

1898 Telegraphone, recording magnetically on steel wire, patented in Denmark by Valdemar Poulsen.  

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1898 Emile Berliner producing his first shellac discs.   

1898 Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen re-discovers the principle of magnetic recording. Over the course of the next few years he produces practical sound recorders for steel wire and tape. He takes patents in Denmark, the United States, and elsewhere and attempts to sell his patent rights to investors. The machine, called the telegraphone, is described as a device to record telephone messages in the absence the called party.


1900 Poulsen unveils his invention to the public at the Paris Exposition. Austria's Emperor Franz Josef records his congratulations.  

1900 The telegraphone is described in glowing terms by the technical and scientific press as superior to the phonograph and a great advance in physics as well.  

1900 Boston's Symphony Hall opens with the benefit of Wallace Clement Sabine's acoustical advice.

1901 The Victor Talking Machine Company is founded by Emile Berliner and Eldridge Johnson.; Experimental optical recordings are made on motion picture film.

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1903 Caruso puts on the motley for the first million seller.  

1903 TF The American telegraphone Company formed in Washington, D.C. to manufacture of  the telegraphone. American Telegraphone Co. sets up a manufacturing facility in Wheeling, West Virginia to make the machines, and the company initiates a large public stock offering. American telegraphone creates several distributorships across the country to handle service and sales. Telegraphone publicity over the next decade or so promotes the various models of the machine as a dictation system and an automatic telephone recorder.

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History of Sound 2