Gramophone Record

In the year 1856, Leon Scot demonstrated how to record sounds on the Phonoautograph. This was the first time there had been sound recording but not sound reproduction. On November 8, 1887, Emile Berliner, a man from Germany working in Washington, D.C., patented recording sounds on round flat disks (records), instead of the cylinders previous inventors such as Scot and Edison used. At first the records were made out of glass but then they turned to zinc and later plastic. These records were the first way people could mass produce sound recordings and put them in a mold. Berliner's records were more durable than Edison's so they were quickly popularized and could be created more quickly and they didn't need to be stored in a large storage box like the cylinders. Berliner had made enough money to hire the Duranoid Company to produce his records and they came up with a shellac pressing that was even more superior to the plastic. In 1896 he formed the Berliner Gramophone Company of Philadelphia and they had a national level distribution.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone

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