The phonograph, record player, or gramophone is a device that was most commonly used from the late 1870s through the 1980s for playing soundrecordings. The recordings played on such a device generally consist of wavy lines that are either scratched, engraved, or grooved onto a rotating cylinder or disc. As the cylinder or disc rotates, a needle or other similar object on the device traces the wavy lines and vibrates, reproducing sound waves.

The device traces back to the phonautograph, invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857, which could only create visual images of sound. It was not until 1877 when Thomas Edison successfully conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound, and demonstrated the phonograph for the first time. Edison's early devices recorded sound onto a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders, and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a "zig zag" pattern across the record. Then at the turn of the century, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to gramophone records: flat, double-sided discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center. Other improvements were made throughout the years, including modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the needle and stylus, and the sound and equalization systems.

The gramophone record was one of the dominant audio recording formats throughout much of the 20th Century. However, that status was eventually replaced by the Compact Disc and other digital recording formats.

Terminology

Usage of these terms is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, this device is often called a turntable, record player, or record changer. When used in conjunction with amixer as part of a DJ set up, they are often called decks.

The term phonograph ("sound writer") is derived from the Greek words (meaning "sound" or "voice" and transliterated as phonē) and (meaning "writing" and transliterated as graphē). Similar related terms gramophone and graphophone have similar root meanings. The coinage, particularly the use of the -graph root, may have been influenced by the then-existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Timescarried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers' Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings.

F. B. Fenby was the original author of the word. An inventor in Worcester, Massachusetts, he was granted a patent in 1863 for an unsuccessful device called the "Electro-Magnetic Phonograph". His concept detailed a system that would record a sequence of keyboard strokes onto paper tape. Although no model or workable device was ever made, it is often seen as a link to the concept of punched paper for player piano rolls (1880s), as well as Herman Hollerith's punch card tabulator (used in the 1890 United States census), a distant precursor of the modern computer.

Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice it has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone" and the like were still brand names specific to different makers of sometimes very different (i.e., cylinder and disc) machines, so considerable use was made of the generic term talking machine, especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech by simulating the workings of the vocal chords, tongue and lips, a potential source of confusion both then and now.

United Kingdom

In British English, gramophone referred to any sound reproducing machine using 78 rpm gramophone records, as disc records were popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. The term phonograph was usually restricted to devices playing cylinder records.

Gramophone generally referred to a wind-up machine. After the introduction of the softer vinyl records, 33 1�3 rpm LPs and 45 rpm EPs, the common name became record player or turntable initially as part of a system that included radio (radiogram) and, later, might also play cassettes. From about 1960 such a system began to be described as a hi-fi or stereo (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s).

United States

In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others, but it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to the upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs. "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but in the early 20th Century the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played.

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