On September 26, 1887 a playback device was patented, which became truly revolutionary
September 26 is sometimes called the birthday of a gramophone record, sometimes – of a gramophone. In fact, this is how it happened: on September 26, 1887, the American inventor Emil Berliner, an émigré from Germany, applied to patent a fully functioning sound recording and reproducing apparatus, which he called a gramophone. It is interesting that the same year in America, the famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison tried to patent a similar device, but he was refused a patent since he did not present a functioning sample.
Berliner's invention turned out to be surprisingly durable - after all, more than one hundred and thirty years have passed since the time he invented a needle that slides on a plate with grooves.
The museum Collection repository features turntable units for gramophone records, Pathe records and Edison records, created by various firms during major part of the 20th century - from gramophones with horns of the century beginning up to musical slot machines – Juke-boxes of the 1970s. The oldest devices in the museum collection are the Berliner's hand-operated gramophones produced in 1893. Devices produced during the mechanical recording industry formation and heyday comprise the major body of the collection section “Recording and playback devices”. The gramophones produced by the American and European brands such as “Victor Talking Machine Co”, “Columbia Graphophone Co.”, “Decca Records”, “The Gramophone Co Ltd” and others are presented in the museum. Domestic manufacturers are represented, in particular, by portable gramophones produced by various factories in the 1930-1950s. Devices that reproduce vertical recording comprise a special category – authentic "Gramophones" of the French company "Pathe" and disc phonographs of the "Diamond disk" system of Edison.
Recent years have provided us the opportunity to download music from the Internet using technologies, the principle of which, unlike the design of a gramophone, will never be fully understood by the overwhelming majority of the world's population. However, most adults living on this planet today will always remember that music in their lives appeared precisely thanks to this mechanism.