In this blog article, we would like to give you a few facts and stories about our favorite sound carrier – the disk. We’re sure that some of you know a lot about it and you can also read about it in various Wiki articles, but we would like to present it here for you, bundled together and enriched with a few stories.
The Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was the first to succeed in recording sound. He applied for a patent for the principle of the phonograph in 1857. However, the implementation took some time, as he only succeeded in recording the French children's song “Au clair de la lune” on April 9, 1860. With the help of a large funnel and a membrane attached to a pig's bristle, he was able to transmit the vibrations of the sound to a roller blackened with soot.
Of course, he was unable to play back the recorded sounds, he could only see them. It was not until 2008 that it was possible to make the sounds recorded by Martinville audible. A phonograph autograph from 1860 had been found in the archives of the Académie des sciences, which could be reconstructed and made audible in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And so, 148 years after the recording, the voice of Scott de Martin singing “Au clair de la lune” could be heard.
It was not until 1877 that Thomas Alva Edison succeeded in reproducing sound recordings with his phonograph. Edinson was a brilliant inventor and businessman to whom the world of technology owes a great deal. However, he always resisted the term 'genius'; in his words, genius was 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration. The phongraph he designed and patented was built by his long-time partner John Kruesi. The tones were engraved in treble writing, corresponding to the vibration of the membrane at the end of the sound funnel, by a stylus in a cylinder covered with tin foil. Here too, the first recording was a children's song, “Mary Had A Little Lamb”. However, the sounds that could then be reproduced were imprecise and had a lot of background noise. Edison himself – otherwise a clever businessman – initially saw no great economic advantage in his invention and turned his attention to other areas. However, he later realized this mistake and dedicated himself to this field after all.
In France, Charles Cros (who was actually a poet and author) submitted a paper to the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1877 in which he vividly described Edison's principle of sound recording using a pen on a membrane, engraving it on a metal foil and then reproducing it – without knowing Edison's work. However, this idea was never realized; Cros called the device he conceived the 'Paléophone'. As with so many other inventions that were born in parallel in different parts of the world, the time was simply ripe – just think of the telephone, which also has several fathers.
In the meantime, however, another player had emerged in the field of sound recording who was to revolutionize the entire system and is the actual inventor of the record. In 1887, Emil Berliner (a German born in Hanover who emigrated to the USA in 1870) applied for a patent for a disk-shaped sound carrier on which a spiral groove was carved from the outside to the inside, containing the sound vibrations in lateral writing. The great advantage of the record was that it could be produced industrially right from the start and did not have to be recorded individually. Initially, Berliner's records were made of hard rubber, later a mixture of cotton flakes, slate powder, carbon black and shellac was used – a very inexpensive raw material at the time.
In addition to easy reproducibility, the record also had the advantage over the Edison cylinder that it could be produced on two sides from 1904, i.e. it contained a piece of music on each side. From 1911, Edinson also presented records, the Edison-Diamond-Disc. Like his phonograph reels, the sound was recorded in deep writing, in contrast to Emil Berliner's records, which recorded the sound in side writing. Diamond discs could not be played on the gramophone, which was already in widespread use at the time, as this would have destroyed the records immediately.
The beginning of the 20th century was characterized by a multitude of competing systems in the field of sound recording, all of which were incompatible with each other. The French company Pathé also produced deep-writing records that were not compatible with either Berliner's or Edinson's records. By the mid-1920s, however, the record developed by Emil Berliner had established itself and all other systems gradually disappeared from the market. The last phonograph cylinders (Edinson Blue Amberol) went on sale in 1929.
The shellac record was available in a variety of sizes before the 10″ and 12″ disks, which were common until the 1960s, became established. In addition to the usual formats, you will also find 6″, 7″, 8″ and 9″ records in our database, even if there are not many of them. There has also been a lot of experimentation with speed. From 50 RPM to 100 RPM, there were all kinds of different speeds until the speed of 78 RPM finally became generally accepted.
During the Second World War, shellac became scarce and expensive, so in the 1940s a new material was developed for record production - polyvinyl chloride - commonly known as vinyl. It is astonishing that the first vinyl record from RCA Victor was launched in 1930 – it had a diameter of 30 cm (12″) and was played at 33 1⁄3 RPM. Does that sound familiar? However, this development was not successful, it simply came too early and the lack of suitable playback equipment was the main reason for this. At the end of the 1930s, radio programs and commercials began to be recorded and sent to other broadcasters on vinyl, as these records were virtually unbreakable and could withstand the rustic transport of the time. The market for children was then also discovered and as shellac records were not really suitable for children due to their fragility, the first vinyl records were marketed here. They were not only available in the usual 10″ size, smaller formats were also produced. They were played at 78 RPM with the normal steel gramophone needles.
Vinyl records were first used on a larger scale by the US Army in 1942 as the so-called V-Disc (Victory Disc) to provide the GIs with entertainment and classical music. During the recording strike by US musicians (August 1942 to November 1944), V-Discs were the only recordings with instrumental musicians permitted in the USA. V-Discs usually had a diameter of 12″ and ran at 78 RPM, more rarely at 33 1⁄3 RPM. But the classic steel needle was taboo for these vinyl records; they were played with the smaller microsapphire.
And in 1949, RCA Victor launched the medium that was to become the fire accelerator of rock 'n' roll a few years later. As a competitor to the Columbia LP, RCA Victor developed the 7″ (17.5 cm) single with a large center hole, which was played at 45 RPM. This format was chosen because almost all pieces of music could be divided into 5-minute takes. In order to keep up with the playback length of the Columbia LP, RCA-Victor offered automatic record changers for their format. Both formats were initially marketed as competitors, and the record players on offer initially only had one speed each and you had to choose between 33 1⁄3 RPM or 45 RPM. There was already a “format war” of this kind with shellac records and also a few years later with audio cassettes and video cassette systems. It wasn't until the mid-1950s that record players were available that could play all three common speeds at the time (33 1⁄3, 45 and 78 RPM).
The LP was preferred by the parents' generation, but the kids loved the 7″ vinyl! It only cost a few cents, was easy to transport to play at friends' houses and, above all, the battery-powered record players that came onto the market at the time were a hit with teenagers. You could use them outside where no father or mother would yell at you to turn the music down. Portable gramophones had been around for a long time, but they were big and bulky. And don't forget that a 10″ shellac record was quite heavy (150 to 200 grams) and if you took 20 - 30 records with you, you had to lug around a few kilos. The lightweight 7″ was a real advantage.
We'll go out on a limb and say that without the 7″ single, the rapid success of pop music and rock 'n' roll would never have happened. The jukebox, for which the 7″ single was now the ideal medium, promoted the development of pop music even further. Machines that played music by inserting a coin had been around for a long time, but the popularity of jukeboxes increased with the almost unbreakable vinyl single and its ease of use. Every self-respecting pub installed a Wurlitzer, Seeburg or Rock-Ola. The music industry quickly recognized this and produced lots of singles in addition to LPs, often as a pre-release of an LP or album.
New formats were also tried out, such as the 7″ EP in the early 1950s, which usually contained four, but sometimes six or eight songs on both sides. EPs initially ran at 45 RPM, but soon EPs were also produced that played at 33 1⁄3, RPM. The resulting reduction in sound quality was accepted, as the pop music on them was not considered to be of any great artistic value anyway. And the singles became colorful! Not only the boring black was on the turntable, they were soon available in all colors, including crystal clear and transparent. All of these are often coveted collector's items today, but you shouldn't play them too often, they were noisier and wore themselves and the cartridge out.
At the end of the 1960s, the first picture discs came onto the market. Singles (later also LPs) that were not monochrome but showed a picture. Today, these are also coveted collector's items with similar weaknesses in sound quality. And another collector's item came onto the market: the shape disk. It was only round at the point required to play the music. Beyond that, any shape was possible that would fit on the turntable. You could use the band logo in cut-out form, a motif of the song or whatever the band or the marketing department could think of. It's impossible to say how many pickup needles this single shape killed, but the things were not harmless. You had to be damn careful where you lowered the tonearm, because the groove was often close to the angular or serrated edge. Shape discs were even continued today as shape CDs.
Flexi-Discs, records made from a flexible material or plastic-coated, thin cardboard, came onto the market as early as the 1950s. They were popular as sounding vacation greetings in postcard format or as inserts in fan magazines. In the Soviet Union, “Кругозор”, a youth magazine that contained up to ten of these flexible music foils, which could even be played on both sides, was published for several years. Of course, the sound quality of these flexis could not be compared with vinyl records, but they were a popular medium for a while.
A particularly delicate form of flexi-discs were the ‘ribs’ (рёбра), also known as ‘music on the ribs’ (Музыка на рёбрах) or ‘jazz on bones’ (Джаз на костях), which were illegally cut onto X-ray films in the Soviet Union. X-ray films could be fished out of hospital garbage or bought cheaply there. The films were cut to 7″ size, the center hole was simply burned in with a cigarette and the music was cut into the film at 78 RPM. The quality was of course atrocious, but this is how music that was banned in the Soviet Union was able to spread in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1989, the number of CDs produced in Germany (56.9 million units) exceeded the number of vinyl LPs produced (48.3 million units) for the first time. This had already happened in the USA the previous year. And now a line from Hildegard Knef could be quoted: “From now on, things went downhill”. The low point was in 2001, when 0.6 million LPs were produced in Germany compared to 133.7 million CDs. But as is often the case – the dead live longer! After only a few die-hard fans remained loyal to vinyl during the hunger years of the first decade of the 21st century, 4.3 million LPs were produced again in 2022 and vinyl also experienced a renaissance worldwide. Not only that, many artists even found it chic again to press their songs onto a 7″ single. New pressing plants were even built and more modern presses developed, meaning that more LPs than CDs were sold in the USA again for the first time in 2022. Well, but thanks to streaming services, CDs aren't doing so well these days either.
We could write much, much more about vinyl records: When the first stereo records were sold and which systems were used. Why the MiniDisc (MD) from Sony was not able to establish itself as the successor to the compact cassette and which other systems tried to compete with the CD in the 1990s. However, we would like to leave it at that for now – there are enough links in the text so that every curious user can read and browse the web for themselves.
In any case, there is something special about a vinyl record that a CD (and certainly not a streamed song) cannot compete with. You take it out of its decorative sleeve, place it carefully on the turntable, remove the dust with a soft brush, then gently place the tonearm in the starting groove, lean back and enjoy the music – a little ritual. And the cover sleeves of the LPs were very often real little works of art (sometimes scandalous ones, but that's another topic). If you are interested in the effort that went into the design and production of cover sleeves in the 1970s and 80s (and how much money the record companies were prepared to pay for them), we recommend the documentary “Squaring the circle”, the story of the “Hipgnosis” company.
Then have fun browsing the net on the subject of “vinyl records” and of course we look forward to your comments.
