“A few decades after the start of Tin Pan Alley and the sheet music business, an entrepreneur comes along with another invention — essentially another way to fix a musical idea in form,” explains Dan Charnas. “And that entrepreneur was Thomas Edison. And in addition to inventing the light bulb, he also invented the phonograph or gramophone.”
John Carlin adds, “Thomas Edison was a true genius, maybe one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century. He invented a way to record music and commercialize it, and that’s really the key. Now, the interesting thing about Thomas Edison is that he was deaf when he was a young man. Someone had cuffed him on the ears, and he had lost his hearing. And not only did he have bad hearing, but he also was thought to have very bad taste in music. However, he was a mechanical engineering genius, the equivalent Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak in our world.
“Edison created this machine, the phonograph, which utilized a wax cylinder. It was a round device, and a needle would etch the sound into the wax. To use it for recording, people would push their heads or their instruments into a big horn, and the horn would record on the wax. Then, when you played it back through the machine, the sound was amplified through the horn.”
Carlin describes Edison’s early efforts as “somewhat of a niche business. He would sell the wax cylinders, but he was mainly interested in selling the machines to people. So, in the early days of the recording industry, the music was essentially given away to sell the machines to musicians and get them into people’s homes.”
With music education, you can learn more about the music industry’s roots and many other useful and interesting concepts. With online music education, you can learn all these things without having to leave home.
