Audio Timeline
By: Eric Sutton
Teacher: Mr. Hardin
1877
• Thomas Alva Edison, working in his lab,
succeeds in recovering Mary's Little Lamb
from a strip of tinfoil wrapped around a
spinning cylinder.
1878 -1887
• 1878 The first music is put on record: cornetist
Jules Levy plays "Yankee Doodle."
• 1888 Edison introduces an electric motordriven phonograph
1881
• Clement Ader, using carbon microphones and
armature headphones, accidentally produces
a stereo effect when listeners outside the hall
monitor adjacent telephone lines linked to
stage mikes at the Paris Opera
1887 -1888
• 1887 Emile Berliner is granted a patent on a
flat-disc gramophone, making the production
of multiple copies practical.
• 1888 Edison introduces an electric motordriven phonograph.
1895
• Marconi successfully experiments with his
wireless telegraphy system in Italy, leading to
the first transatlantic signals from Poldhu,
Cornwall, UK to St. John's, Newfoundland in
1901.
1898
• 1898 Valdemar Poulsen patents his
"Telegraphone," recording magnetically on
steel wire
• 1900 Poulsen unveils his invention to the
public at the Paris Exposition. Austria's
Emperor Franz Josef records his
congratulations.
• Boston's Symphony Hall opens with the
benefit of Wallace Clement Sabine's acoustical
advice
1901
• The Victor Talking Machine Company is
founded by Emile Berliner and Eldridge
Johnson.
• Experimental optical recordings are made on
motion picture film.
• 1906 Lee DeForest invents the triode vacuum
tube, the first electronic signal amplifier.
• 1910 Enrico Caruso is heard in the first live
broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, NYC.
1912 -1913
• 1912 Major Edwin F. Armstrong is issued a
patent for a regenerative circuit, making radio
reception practical.
• The first "talking movie" is demonstrated by
Edison using his Kinetophone process, a
cylinder player mechanically synchronized to a
film projector
1916
• A patent for the superheterodyne circuit is
issued to Armstrong.
• The Society of Motion Picture Engineers
(SMPE) is formed.
• Edison does live-versus-recorded
demonstrations in Carnegie Hall, NYC.
1917
• The Scully disk recording lathe is introduced.
• E. C. Wente of Bell Telephone Laboratories
publishes a paper in Physical Review
describing a "uniformly sensitive instrument
for the absolute measurement of sound
intensity" -- the condenser microphone.
1919 -1921
• 1919 The Radio Corporation of America (RCA)
is founded. It is owned in part by United Fruit.
• 1921 The first commercial AM radio broadcast
is made by KDKA, Pittsburgh PA.
1925
• Bell Labs develops a moving armature lateral
cutting system for electrical recording on disk.
Concurrently they Introduce the Victor
Orthophonic Victrola, "Credenza" model. This allacoustic player -- with no electronics -- is
considered a leap forward in phonograph design.
• The first electrically recorded 78 rpm disks
appear.
• RCA works on the development of ribbon
microphones.
1926
• 1926 O'Neill patents iron oxide-coated paper
tape.
1927
• 1927 "The Jazz Singer" is released as the
first commercial talking picture, using
Vitaphone sound on disks synchronized
with film.
• The Columbia Broadcasting System
(CBS) is formed.
• The Japan Victor Corporation (JVC) is
formed as a subsidiary of the Victor
Talking Machine Co.
1967
• Richard C. Heyser devises the "TDS" (Time Delay Spectrometry)
acoustical measurement scheme, which paves the way for the
revolutionary "TEF" (Time Energy Frequency) technology.
• Altec-Lansing introduces "Acousta-Voicing," a concept of room
equalization utilizing variable multiband filters.
• Elektra releases the first electronic music recording: Morton
Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon.
• The Monterey International Pop Festival becomes the first large
rock music festival.
• The Broadway musical Hair opens with a high-powered sound
system.
• The first operational amplifiers are used in professional audio
equipment, notably as summing devices for multichannel
1969
• 1969 Dr. Thomas Stockham begins to
experiment with digital tape recording.
• Bill Hanley and Company designs and builds
the sound system for the Woodstock Music
Festival.
• 3M introduces Scotch 206 and 207 magnetic
tape, with a s/n ratio 7 dB better than Scotch
111.
Thanks for Watching
By: Eric Sutton
• Credits to
http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/audio.history.
timeline.html