1.19258 Ted Weems E- / E- 2. 18947 Clyde Doerr E- / E- 3. 20035 Victor salon (shilkret) E- / E- 4. 20820 Waring's Pennsylvanians E- / E- 5. 18633 Selvin's Novelty Orchestra V+  / V+ 6. 18550 Vivian Holt Lillian Rosedale E- / E- 7. 18032 Raymond Dixon Orpheus Quartet E- / V++ 8. 18940 Paul Whiteman V++ / V++ 9. 20260 Nat Shilkret E- / E- 10. 20503 Nat Shilkret E- / V++ 11. 20373 Nat Shilkret V+ / V+ 12. 18757 Benson Orchestra Chicago E- / E- 13. 18831 Club royale orchestra E- / E- 14. 18533 Joseph C Smith E- / E-



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Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "", although each of these terms denote categorically distinct items. When used in conjunction with a as part of a setup, turntables are often colloquially called "decks". In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record players or turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an by a , then converted back into sound by a .

Close up of the mechanism of an Edison Amberola, circa 1915

The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the words φωνή (phonē, 'sound' or 'voice') and γραφή (graphē, 'writing'). The similar related terms gramophone (from the Greek γράμμα gramma 'letter' and φωνή phōnē 'voice') and graphophone have similar root meanings.

In , "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using , which were introduced and popularized in the UK by the . Originally, "gramophone" was a proprietary of that company and any use of the name by competing makers of disc records was vigorously prosecuted in the courts, but in 1910 an English court decision decreed that it had become a generic term;

United States Early phonograph at Deaf Smith County Historical Museum in ,

In , "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 's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played nonrecordable discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs.)

Australia Wood engraving published in , depicting a public demonstration of new technology at the Royal Society of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) on 8 August 1878.

In , "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in . The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June 1878 to a meeting of the by the Society's Honorary Secretary, who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year. On 8 August 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione, along with a range of other new inventions, including the .

Early history Dictionary illustration of a . This version uses a barrel made of . Phonautograph Main article:

The phonautograph was invented on March 25, 1857 by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, an editor and typographer of manuscripts at a scientific publishing house in Paris. One day while editing Professor Longet's Traité de Physiologie, he happened upon that customer’s engraved illustration of the anatomy of the human ear, and conceived of "the imprudent idea of photographing the word." In 1853 or 1854 (Scott cited both years) he began working on "le problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même" ("the problem of speech writing itself"), aiming to build a device that could replicate the function of the human ear.

Scott coated a plate of glass with a thin layer of . He then took an acoustic trumpet, and at its tapered end affixed a thin membrane that served as the analog to the . At the center of that membrane, he attached a rigid boar's bristle approximately a centimeter long, placed so that it just grazed the lampblack. As the glass plate was slid horizontally in a well formed groove at a speed of one meter per second, a person would speak into the trumpet, causing the membrane to vibrate and the stylus to trace figures that were scratched into the lampblack. On March 25, 1857, Scott received the French patent #17,897/31,470 for his device, which he called a phonautograph. The earliest known surviving recorded sound of a human voice was conducted on April 9, 1860 when Scott recorded someone singing the song "" ("By the Light of the Moon") on the device. However, the device was not designed to play back sounds, as Scott intended for people to read back the tracings, which he called phonautograms. This was not the first time someone had used a device to create direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects, as had been used in this way by English physicist in 1807. By late 1857, with support from the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, Scott’s phonautograph was recording sounds with sufficient precision to be adopted by the scientific community, paving the way for the nascent science of acoustics.

The device’s true significance in the history of recorded sound was not fully realized prior to March 2008, when it was discovered and resurrected in a Paris patent office by First Sounds, an informal collaborative of American audio historians, recording engineers, and sound archivists founded to make the earliest sound recordings available to the public. The phonautograms were then digitally converted by scientists at the in California, who were able to play back the recorded sounds, something Scott had never conceived of. Prior to this point, the earliest known record of a human voice was thought to be an 1877 phonograph recording by . The phonautograph would play a role in the development of the , whose inventor, Emile Berliner, worked with the phonautograph in the course of developing his own device.

Paleophone

, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the , a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute.

An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a phonographe, but Cros himself favored the word paleophone, sometimes rendered in French as voix du passé ('voice of the past').[]

Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception.

Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45.

The early phonographs for Edison's phonograph, May 18, 1880

conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by . His first experiments were with waxed paper. He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was on February 19, 1878, as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..."

The music critic attended an early demonstration (1881–2) of a similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct."

newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at the , writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. "Rule Britannia" was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of "He's a jolly good fellow," which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a very cracked voice."

Early machines Phonograph cabinet built with , 1912. The clockwork portion of the phonograph is concealed in the base beneath the statue; the amplifying horn is the shell behind the human figure.

Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally , which was temporarily wrapped around a grooved mounted on a correspondingly supported by plain and threaded . While the cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its , the airborne vibrated a connected to a that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation.

Introduction of the disc record 2:24 This 1906 recording (with the character being voiced by ) enticed store customers with the wonders of the invention.
2 minutes, 23 seconds. Problems playing this file? See .

By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced -based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon") literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.)[]

Oldest surviving recordings

's cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording, although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial. Wax recordings of 's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a recording of made on April 9, 1860.

The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact.

A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one which is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President , but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned.[] These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb, not preserved, has been called the first instance of .

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording. Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th century media legends such as and Shakespearean actor are amongst the earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present.

Improvements at the Volta Laboratory Main article:

and his two associates took Edison's phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax.

Although Edison had in 1877, the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of . However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the system.

Volta's early challenge

Meanwhile, Bell, a and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after having patented the . According to , it was through that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate.

Volta Graphophone See also: A 'G' (Graham Bell) model Graphophone being played back by a typist after its cylinder had recorded dictation.

The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables.

One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by . Tainter was granted on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch.

The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus.

Graphophone commercialization A later-model Columbia Graphophone of 1901 3:52 Edison-Phonograph playing: Iola by the Edison Military Band (video, 3 min 51 s)

In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed applications and began to seek out investors. The of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886, and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first .

After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from created the on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into .

A coin-operated version of the Graphophone, , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company.

The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of and many others, before the became a major factor in .

Disc vs. cylinder as a recording medium

Discs (that aren't re-recordable) are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can be stamped, and the matrixes to stamp disc can be shipped to other printing plants for a global distribution of recordings; cylinders could not be stamped until 1901–1902, when the gold moulding process was introduced by Edison.

Shilkret (originally named Natan Schüldkraut) was born in , United States, to parents who emigrated from Lemberg (now in ). His father played a number of instruments, and made certain that Nat and his three brothers were all accomplished musicians at an early age. Older brother Lew Shilkret was a fine pianist who also worked in the insurance industry. Younger brother Jack Shilkret had a career that paralleled Nathaniel's career: he played clarinet and piano, recorded extensively, and conducted and played piano on the radio and in motion pictures. The youngest brother Harry Shilkret was a medical doctor, who worked his way through school playing trumpet, and continued to play trumpet frequently in Nathaniel's orchestras, particularly for radio broadcasts, long after he was a practicing allergist. Nathaniel Shilkret's brother-in-law, Nathaniel Finston, was a violinist in many organizations in his youth and was musical director for and later for , at one time being Nathaniel Shilkret's boss.

Shilkret was a child prodigy, touring the country with the New York Boys' Orchestra from the ages of seven to thirteen as their clarinet soloist. From his late teens to mid-twenties he was a clarinetist in the best New York music organizations, including the (under and ), the , the House Orchestra, the Russian Symphony Orchestra, 's Orchestra, 's Orchestra, 's Grand Concert Band, 's Band, and 's Band. He was also a rehearsal pianist for , playing for stars who included dancer .

In June 1914, he married Anne Finston (née Anna Finston aka Finkelstein; 1895–1958), sister of a fellow musician Nathaniel Finston (né Nathaniel William Finkelstein; 1890–1979). Nathaniel Shilkret and Anna Finston had a son, Arthur Shilkret (1915–1982).

He joined the Foreign Department of the (later ) around 1915, and soon was made manager of the department.

In 1926, Shilkret became "director of light music" for Victor. He directed thousands of recordings, possibly more than anyone in recording history. His son Arthur estimated the sales of these records was of the order of 50 million copies. He formed, wrote arrangements for, and conducted the Victor Salon Orchestra. He was the conductor of choice for many of Victor's innovative recordings. He conducted Victor's first record made by the electrical process in 1925, the first commercial (albeit unsuccessful) Victor Long Playing record in 1931, and was the first conductor to successfully dub an electrically recorded orchestral accompaniment over the acoustically recorded vocals of , Victor's star recording artist, who died in 1921, before electrical recording was developed. The premiere recording of 's symphonic poem , in 1929, was one of five conducted by Shilkret that later earned . Shilkret also conducted in the first electrical recording of Gershwin's in 1927 (after Whiteman refused to conduct following a disagreement with Gershwin).

Shilkret (center holding baton) with the Victor Salon Orchestra, c. 1925 Radio and the recording studio

He was also one of radio's earliest stars, estimating that he made over 3000 broadcasts between 1925 and 1941, including being the conductor for , regarded as the first major commercial broadcast and the first major variety show. His sponsors included Camel, Carnation, Chesterfield, Esso, Eveready, General Electric, General Motors, , Knickerbocker, Lysol, Maxwell House, Mobil Oil, Palmolive, RCA Victor, and Smith Brothers' Cough Drops.

Between his conducting for records and for radio, virtually every musical star of the day performed under the baton of Nathaniel Shilkret. His orchestra members included , , , , , , , and . , , and all played under his direction. Opera stars , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and were all conducted by Nathaniel Shilkret in their recordings of light-classical and popular songs. The lists of popular singers and foreign artists that played under his direction are just as impressive.

Compositions African Serenade, a 1930 issue of a Nathaniel Shilkret composition recorded with the Victor orchestra

He composed and arranged thousands of pieces. His best-known popular composition was "", first sung by co-writer , and later by (dubbing ) in the final scene of the 1929 part-talkie film version of , and recorded by more than two hundred artists, including , , and . He composed the theme song "Lady Divine" for the Academy Award-winning film in 1929. He also composed the theme song "Some Sweet Day" for the film Children of the Ritz in the same year. His composition "" sold almost two million copies of sheet music and was also recorded by over a hundred top artists, including Louis Armstrong, , , , , , , , and .

His was premiered in 1945 by , playing with the New York Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of . The piece was unavailable to the public from the mid-1950s until Scottish trombonist Bryan Free rescued it from obscurity at the beginning of the 21st century. It was re-premiered at Carnegie Hall by the New York Pops, under the direction of , with as soloist. Since its revival, the Concerto for Trombone has been performed about eighty times (with more performances scheduled) in the United States, Canada and several European countries.

Later career

Shilkret left RCA Victor in mid-1935, but continued to record occasionally for the company. His last recording released on the Victor label was the American Banjo Album (P-218) recorded in October 1946. This album was reissued shortly after the Victor issue as one side of an LP under the Aztec label.

Shilkret moved to Los Angeles in late 1935 and there contributed music scores and musical direction for a string of Hollywood films for (as musical director from 1935 to 1937), (one of the studio's musical directors during 1937) and (as a musical director from 1942 to 1946). His films included Mary of Scotland (1936), Swing Time (1936), The Plough and the Stars, and Shall We Dance? (1937) and several films of . He also received an nomination for his work scoring the film version of 's stage drama Winterset (1936).

Nathaniel Shilkret's letter to in 1945.

In 1939, he conducted a group of soloists (including tenor ) and the Victor Symphony Orchestra for RCA Victor's multi-disc tribute to , which were recorded following a special radio broadcast, and he recorded a number of other albums in 1939 and 1940. Due to a serious abdominal operation for cancer removal, he did not conduct for most of 1941.

In 1944–45, Shilkret led the that created , a work for narrator, chorus, and orchestra based on the events in the biblical . This collaboration involved Shilkret, plus six other composers who immigrated to the United States from Europe – most of whom were Jewish – contributing one movement each: , , , , and . Shilkret also tried to involve in the collaborative project, but this was unsuccessful.

He worked at RKO-Pathe, making short films from 1946 through the mid-1950s. During this same period he recorded at least 260 transcriptions for SESAC. He was the pit orchestra conductor for the Broadway show Paris '90 in 1952.

In 1951, Shilkret wrote the music for a brief documentary titled, The Flying Padre, that was directed by a young .

He lived in his son's home in from the mid-1950s, until his death in 1982. He was a great-uncle of actress .

References

Joseph Cyrus Smith was born in in 1883. He was of Russian ancestry on his father's side, and Austrian on his mother's. He was a working musician by the time he was 16, and by 1903 was known for working in dance bands. In 1914 he landed the important post as resident dance band at New York's , where he stayed for nine years. He moved to and began a sequence of broadcasts on station . In the late 1920s he traveled widely as leader, including Canada, Europe, and both coasts of the United States. From the 1920s through the 1940s he worked as an arranger for the Robbins Music Corporation. He settled down in the New York City area in the 1930s, and retired in 1945, moving to Florida. He died of a myocardial infarction at a hospital on March 22, 1965. At the time of his death he was married to Margaret Lynch.

Style

Smith was instrumental in the transition from the heavy sound of military marching bands so popular before World War 1 to the lighter sounding dance music of the 1920s. Most of his recorded output are instrumentals, although would sometimes assign an in-house vocalist to some sides. He was the first to record a song. Although not a jazz unit as thought of in the modern sense, Smith did often use jazz colorings in his arrangements. It was Smith's lack of use of instrumental soloists that led to his sound becoming outdated and the corresponding decline in his popularity as a recording artist.

Recordings Smith was active as a recording artist from 1916 until 1925. He first recording session was for Victor, and his first recordings met with mediocre success, but in late 1917 several of his records became big sellers. estimates that 21 of his records were among the top-15 in popularity at some point. His recording of Smiles, featuring on vocals, is estimated to have been the #1 record for a week in August 1918. Many of his records featured medleys taken from current Broadway shows. By 1922 his records were not selling as well, and he made his last recordings for Victor in March of that year. He then recorded briefly for in 1923. He last recorded in Mon . . Retrieved October 10, 2021.
Shilkret, Nathaniel, ed. Shell, Niel and Barbara Shilkret, Nathaniel Shilkret: Sixty Years in the Music Business, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland, 2005.  
Shilkret, Nathaniel, Barbara Shilkret, and Niel Shell, Feast or Famine: Sixty Years in the Music Business, archival edition of Shilkret autobiography, 2001 (copies deposited in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, The City College of New York Archival Library, The New York Philharmonic Archives, The Victor Archives (SONY)).
, ed. (1992). (First ed.). . p. 2253/4.  .
Shell, Niel, Nathaniel Shilkret: A Most Prolific and Diverse Creator of Recorded Sound, ARSC Journal, 39 (2008), 80—90. External links