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From Talking Machines to Music Machines: The Early Years of Recorded Sound and Playback in Pictures and Audio
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2023
Abstract
Between Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 and World War I, inventors, entrepreneurs, performers, and listeners transformed the singular talking machines of the late 1870s to the ubiquitous music machines of the twentieth century. Through selected images, objects, and links to period sounds, this essay offers a chronological glimpse of interacting social, technical, and entrepreneurial forces at work. Combining visual, aural, and material sources in this way enlarges the historian’s toolbox for understanding the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
- Type
- Photo Essay
- Information
- Copyright
- © Smithsonian Institution, 2023 outside of the United States of America. As a work owned by the United States Government, this Contribution is not subject to copyright within the United States. Outside of the United States, Cambridge University Press is the non-exclusively licensed publisher of the Contribution. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 Introduction to this special issue by Rebecca McKenna and David Suisman.
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18 Suisman, Selling Sounds, 91–92; advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 26, 1924, 84.
19 Suisman, Selling Sounds, 277.
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