Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record

Richard Osborne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317001805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record is the first in-depth study of the vinyl record. Richard Osborne traces the evolution of the recording format from its roots in the first sound recording experiments to its survival in the world of digital technologies. This book addresses the record's relationship with music: the analogue record was shaped by, and helped to shape, the music of the twentieth century. It also looks at the cult of vinyl records. Why are users so passionate about this format? Why has it become the subject of artworks and advertisements? Why are vinyl records still being produced? This book explores its subject using a distinctive approach: the author takes the vinyl record apart and historicizes its construction. Each chapter explores a different element: the groove, the disc shape, the label, vinyl itself, the album, the single, the b-side and the 12" single, and the sleeve. By anatomizing vinyl in this manner, the author shines new light on its impact and appeal.

Chapter 1
The Groove

Introduction

The truth is in the groove! The truth is in the groove! (Nathan 1999: 142–3)

Record label bosses took up this chant in April 1981 at a Billboard-sponsored conference in Athens. It was their response to the compact disc, the digital format that had recently been unveiled by its joint developers Sony and Philips. The problems began when Norio Ohga, Sony’s deputy executive president, attempted to promote the prototype CD player, a device that threatened to replace vinyl’s analogous grooves with alienating zeros-and-ones. The focus of the protest was apt. The groove has been the one constant in the analogue record’s evolution. Its thread can be traced from vinyl records back to shellac; from there to Emile Berliner’s original gramophone discs; and preceding these to Thomas Edison’s cylinders, the first recording devices to audibly reproduce sound. And its truth? Well, that lies in language. The groove is a text that dissolves the difference between signifier and signified.

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure divided language into two component parts: there is the word as written (the ‘signifier’) and there is the concept that that word seeks to describe (the ‘signified’) (Saussure 1966). He argued that the relationship between the two is arbitrary. For example, there is nothing rose-like about the word rose; like all words its form as letters on a page bears no relation to its existence as a thing. This is not the case with the writing on a record; here a natural force makes the inscription. As implied by the names ‘phonograph’ and ‘gramophone’, both of which derive from the Greek for ‘sound-writing’, it is sound itself that decides the patterns of the groove.

C.S. Peirce used the term ‘indexical’ to describe instances where the signifier is causally related to the signified, the classic examples being smoke and fire, and thunder and lightning (1960: 170–72). The record’s groove can be grouped with these, but it is also beyond them. Sound creates the groove (there’s no smoke without fire); but the groove can also reanimate the sound (there’s no fire without smoke); furthermore, the groove is extant whether it is reanimated or not (here there is smoke without fire). It is within this web of relationships that fascination with the groove lies.

This chapter traces the evolution and development of the grooved recording. It also examines the ways that the groove has been thought about and used. The groove has particular qualities: it is indexical and yet it can exist in its own right. As a consequence, there has been fascination with its appearance: from the beginnings of recorded sound people have sought to understand its graphic traces. There has also been fascination with the fact that the groove can be touched: people have taken advantage of the fact that these patterns of sound can be accessed and manipulated. Finally, there has been fascination with the groove’s mortality. The groove was the first means of preserving a ‘record’ of sound; however the groove itself also needed to be preserved. Its aging process has been a source of both frustration and pleasure.

Léon Scott’s Phonautograph

The prototypes of today’s vinyl discs are the records developed by Emile Berliner in the late 1880s for his playback invention, the gramophone. The groove itself was first reanimated in order to produce sound in 1877 when Thomas Edison introduced his phonograph and its cylinder recordings. And yet both of these inventors mention a forebear. Announcing his gramophone at the Franklin Institute in 1888 Berliner stated that the Phonautograph, invented by Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1856, was the point of origin for his playback device and for his laterally grooved records (Berliner 1888a). Thomas Edison, viewing the same machine at the Smithsonian Institute, expressed surprise that Scott ‘having gone so far’ had not beaten him in his work (Lewis-Young 1907b: 576).

Berliner took pains to describe the workings of the Phonautograph during his Franklin Institute address, as well as highlighting the influence it had upon Edison’s invention:

[It] had for its purpose the recording of sound vibrations upon a cylinder rotated by hand and moved forward by a screw. The cylinder was covered with paper, this was smoked over a flame, and a stylus attached to the centre of the diaphragm under the influence of words spoken into a large barrel-like mouthpiece, would trace sound vibrations upon the smoky surface. Scott also employed an animal membrane for his diaphragm, and took pains, by means of an attachment called a sub-divider, to make the vibrations appear as large as possible. This sub-divider, became the prototype of the dampers in subsequent apparatus, like the … Edison phonograph. (1988a: 3–4)

There is a crucial difference between Edison’s and Scott’s machines, however. Edison’s phonograph holds the distinction of being the first device to audibly reproduce sound. Scott’s Phonautograph was attempting a different feat: its aim was to represent sound visually. It was designed, Scott claimed, to capture the ‘natural stenography’ of noise (Sterne 2003: 45). The vibrations that the Phonautograph traced were to be photographed and then studied, with the aim of decoding this new language. There was no thought that the inscriptions should be reconverted into sound.

This supposed oversight elicited Edison’s puzzled reaction at the Smithsonian Institute. He viewed his own machine as the next obvious step, but is this really the case? With Scott’s machine a natural phenomenon – sound – was the author. The reader of its script was always intended to be human. With Edison’s phonograph the ‘stylus’ takes over; a writing instrument reads for us. This was unprecedented, a leap that Edison himself regarded as a discovery rather than an invention.

Discovery of the Phonograph

Thomas Edison registered 1,093 United States patents and yet out of all of these the phonograph was his favourite: ‘Which do I consider my greatest?’ he pondered, ‘Well, my reply to that would be that I like the phonograph best’ (Edison 1948: 169). Edison claimed that sound recording was a lucky breakthrough, one that he had not sought (Millard: 37). The irony here is that another person was looking for it. The French amateur scientist and poet Charles Cros conceived a phonograph slightly earlier than Edison, but failed to gain backing for his ideas or to produce a working model.

On 30 April 1877 Cros deposited a sealed envelope with the Académie des sciences de France containing his paper on the ‘Process of Recording and of Reproducing Audible Phenomena’:

In general, my process consists in obtaining the tracing of the to-and-fro movements of a vibrating membrane, and the utilization of this tracing for reproducing the same to-and-fro movement, with their relative inherent durations and intensities in the same membrane, or in another adapted for furnishing the sounds and noises which result from this series of movements … A light stylus is connected with the centre of a vibrating membrane; it terminates in a point (metallic wire, the barb of a feather, etc.), which bears upon a surface blackened by a flame. This surface is a part of a disc to which is given a double movement of rotation and rectilinear progression. (Cros 1920: 630)

Emile Berliner believed that if this machine been constructed it would have represented ‘a modified Scott phonautograph’ (1888a: 6).

The first publicity Cros’s paper received was in an article written by the Abbé Lenoir for La Semaine du clergé, published 10 October 1877. This piece is prescient in two respects. First, the Abbé Lenoir names Cros’s invention the ‘phonograph’. Second, he has the foresight to see that the machine will be used for reproducing music:

By means of this instrument which, if we were called upon to serve as godfather, we should christen phonograph, it will be possible to take photographs of the voice as we now take them of the face … Will that not be one of the most curious things that can possibly be imagined? To sit for a while and listen, for example, to the singing of some song which has rendered such-and-such a singer famous, and to hear this song rendered with the same identical voice by a simple physical instrument named the phonograph. (Buick 1927: 20)

On 3 December 1877 Cros requested that his sealed paper be read and made public. Roland Gelatt, writer of one of the first authoritative histories of sound recording, regards this ‘a move presumably stimulated by reports of Edison’s successful experiments in America’ (1977: 24).

The chronology of the events of 1877 makes it almost certain that Edison had no awareness of Cros’s paper when he embarked on the development of his machine. His phonograph was the by-product of his own, separate ventures. This machine, according to Robert Conot, ‘was the offspring of entirely different inventions; an inimitable mutation’ (1979: 97). Among the ideas that Edison had been exploring were a speaker for the telephone, a copying machine based on the electromagnetic principle, technology and devices for the automatic telegraph, and ways in which Western Union could employ the telephone in their operations. Like Léon Scott, Edison was originally inspired by thoughts of making sound visible. However, where Scott’s inspiration was scientific, Edison’s was commercial. The investigations that he was undertaking for Western Union led him to contemplate the possibility that the sound waves of telephone calls might be captured visually and then be translated into written text.

In his article ‘The Perfected Phonograph’ Edison writes of contemplating the possibility that ‘the sound waves set going by a human voice might be so directed as to trace an impression upon some solid substance’. He continues:

My own discovery that this could be done came to me almost accidentally while I was busy with experiments having a different object in view. I was engaged upon a machine intended to repeat Morse characters … In manipulating this paper I found that when the cylinder carrying the indented paper was turned with great swiftness, it gave off a humming noise from the indentations – a musical, rhythmic sound resembling that of human talk heard indistinctly. This led me to try fitting a diaphragm to the machine, which would receive the vibrations or sound-waves made by my voice when I talked to it, and register these vibrations upon an impressible material placed on the cylinder … I saw at once that the problem of registering human speech, so that it could be repeated by mechanical means as often as might be desired, was solved. (1888: 642–3)

The leap had occurred. Edison was now considering the mechanical reproduction, rather than the transcription, of visualized sound. In his laboratory notebooks of 18 July 1877 he writes: ‘Just tried experiment with diaphragm having an embossing point and held against paraffin paper moving rapidly. The speaking vibrations are indented nicely, and there’s no doubt that I shall be able to store up and reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly’ (Conot 1979: 99–100).

The first public disclosure of this discovery was contained in Edison’s English Telephone Patent of 30 July 1877, in which he states that ‘some portions of my improvement can be availed of to make a record of the atmospheric sound waves’ (Wile 1977: 17). The next evidence of his thinking is provided in his notebook drawings of August 1877. Although the date of some of these drawings has been disputed, it would appear that Edison was by this point planning recording experiments that would use tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder (Conot 1979: 100; Wile 1977: 18). He had also christened his invention the ‘phonograph’. For Edison this term had textual connotations: as a teenage telegrapher he had used Ben Pitman’s shorthand method, as outlined in the Manual of Phonography (Gitelman 1999: 62).

On 7 September 1877 Edison wrote out a press release relating to his findings. This would therefore have been composed over a month before Charles Cros’s phonograph was publicized in La Semaine du Clergé. At this point, however, Edison had not produced a working model of his machine. Conot believes that this decisive event took place early the following month (1979: 106). On 3 December 1877 – the day that Cros’s sealed paper was opened – Edison, together with his assistants Charles Batchelor and Jim Adams, sketched out three possible formats for the groove: a continuous strip, a disc or a cylinder. The following day Edison asked his mechanic John Kruesi to build a machine based on the latter design. This original phonograph consisted of the cylinder, which was wrapped with tinfoil, and two separate diaphragm-and-needle units, one of which was used for recording, the other for playing the recording back. At the commencement of the recording the cylinder would be rotated along a hand-cranked screw, and as it revolved the needle would indent the tinfoil with a groove.

On the evening of 4 December 1877 the phonograph was tested by Edison in front of a small group of his assistants. Legend has it that his first recording was the nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. When it re-emerged through the machine it was a shock to him. He later commented, ‘I was never so taken aback in my life – I was always afraid of things that worked the first time’ (Read and Welch 1976: 18).

Development of the Groove

The first US patent was issued for Edison’s phonograph on 19 February 1878. Henceforth, those wishing to enter the fledging record business would have to do so either by obtaining the rights to manufacture Edison’s machine or by introducing patentable recording devices of their own. The latter path led to new types of groove.

There was a gap in the market too. Edison’s serendipitous invention was launched without any specific purpose in mind. In his 1877 notebooks he had tumbled out ideas:

I propose to apply the phonograph principle to make Dolls speak sing cry & make various sounds also apply it to all kinds of Toys such as Dogs animals fowls reptiles human figures to cause them to make various sounds to Steam Toy Engines exhausts & whistles = to reproduce from sheets music both orchestral instrumental & vocal … I also propose to make toy music boxes & toy talking boxes playing several tunes also to clocks and watches for calling out the time of day or waking a person for advertisements rotated continuously by clockwork. (Conot 1979: 106)

The tinfoil phonograph in fact functioned as a curiosity. In its advertising the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company admitted that ‘The adaptation of this wonderful invention to the practical uses of commerce not having, as yet, been completed in all its mechanical details, this company is now prepared to offer to the public only that design or form of apparatus which has been found best adapted to its exhibition as a novelty’ (Gelatt 1977: 26). In 1878 the phonograph was toured around America and Europe illustrating the wonders, but not the practical applications, of recorded sound. It could do little more. W.H. Preece, who gave the first phonograph demonstration in England, said of the machine’s reproduction, ‘to some extent it is a burlesque or parody of the human voice’ (ibid.: 30). Théodore du Moncel, who was given the same duty in France, stated ‘we have only heard the harsh and unpleasant voice of Punch’ (1879: 335). They were lucky to have produced any results at all. Edison later admitted, ‘no one but an expert could get anything intelligible back from it’ (Gelatt 1977: 26).

Consequently, interest in the phonograph withered. Even Edison neglected the machine in favour of new work. The Philadelphia Record captured the scene at his laboratory circa 1880:

Electric light is the one absorbing subject of thought and the one object of attention at Menlo Park … The mysterious phonograph, the capacities of which for receiving messages and transmitting them again, either instantly or a hundred years hence, astonished the world, was carelessly pointed out to a reporter with about the same degree of interest as a boarding-school miss would allude to a discarded doll or that a full-grown man would exhibit a kit made in the days of his boyhood. (‘The Coming Light’ 1880: 1)

It took the arrival of the Graphophone to reawaken his interest. Patented in 1886, this derivative machine was the work of Charles Sumner Tainter and the brothers Chichester and Alexander Graham Bell. The Graphophone’s parentage was admitted: the first recording said to have been made on it declared, ‘G-r-r- I am a graphophone and my mother was a phonograph’ (Barfe 2004: 13). Nevertheless, the machine does bring us closer to later record players and their discs in several important ways. First, in place of tinfoil, the team introduced a more durable recording substance: cardboard coated with wax (this also allowed for a greater concentration of grooves). Second, Edison’s static reproducing needle was replaced with a ‘floating stylus’ that was guided by the diaphragm and by the record itself. Finally, rather than ‘indent’, as in Edison’s recording process, the Graphophone’s stylus ‘incised’ the grooves. The inventors argued that indenting a material merely changes its shape, whereas incising involves the removal of material. On this basis they were given patent rights to manufacture their machine. Edison responded in June 1888 with his ‘Perfected Phonograph’, a device that employed each of these advancements. In the following month the investor Jesse H. Lippincott purchased the rights to manufacture both the Graphophone and Edison’s new phonograph. He then created the North American Phonograph Company to license them for use in business as dictation machines.

The German émigré Emile Berliner chose a different format and a different path for the gramophone. Patented in 1887, his device used discs and their proposed content was music rather than office work. As the disc itself was not a patentable device, Berliner’s gramophone patents instead focused on his development of the groove. The pathway that Edison had chosen for the phonograph’s groove was an up-and-down movement (dubbed the ‘hill-and-dale’ motion). Berliner argued that this was the wrong way for the groove to progress. He maintained that the further a groove had to burrow into a resistant material the worse its sound quality would be. Influenced by Léon Scott and Charles Cros, Berliner instead used a lateral movement for his discs (Berliner 1887: 4).

Berliner’s lateral movement was used for the majority of disc recordings until the mid twentieth century. Its eventual successor was Alan Blumlein’s 45°/45° groove, the development that solved the problem of stereo reproduction. As early as 1917 George L. Gresham had written, ‘it is sad to reflect that every gramophone is one-eared’ (1917: 284). His own stereo suggestion had been to split the recording across two separate discs. The French company Pathé had previously arrived at a different solution: prior to the First World War they manufactured experimental stereo discs, which contained the left and right channels in two separate grooves. Others had suggested using the grooves on either side of the disc. Blumlein’s 45°/45° system provided the more effective solution of cutting stereo signals into either side of a single V-shaped groove. This groove progressed both laterally and vertically: the lateral movement reproducing the sum of the left and right signals, and the vertical movement giving their difference. Ratified as industry standard in 1958, the 45°/45° cut has subsequently been employed for all stereo analogue discs.

Sound and Vision

What is striking about early reports on the phonograph is that the text of the recording is always mentioned. Despite Edison’s breakthrough regarding the storing and reproduction of sound there is still a desire to read as well as hear its inscription. On 7 December 1877 the phonograph was displayed to the staff of the Scientific Ameri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Groove
• 2 The Disc
• 3 The Label
• 4 Vinyl
• 5 The LP
• 6 The 45
• 7 The B-Side and the 12″ Single
• 8 The Sleeve
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index