How does a gramophone look?

Answer 1

You need a long answer, not a short answer. First there was the Edison phonograph, which recorded speech or music on a wax cylinder. Then there was the Berliner gramophone, which recorded on a shellac disc. Both of these were mechanical and the sound came out of a horn. Later a cabinet was designed so that the horn principle was folded into a box and the sound came out the front. In 1925 mechanical (acoustic) recording was replaced by electrical recording, but the cylinder was losing its popularity, so Edison went out of the phonograph business in 1929. Because "phonograph" was the original invention, disc records were often called phonograph records in America, although the term gramophone survived in England. The biggest record magazine over there is still called "Gramophone." To see what it looks like, you should find a famous painting called "His Master's Voice," which showed a dog listening to a voice coming out of the horn. Actually, that would have been an Edison phonograph, but the gramophone company liked the picture so much that they had it repainted to look like a disc gramophone, even though their machine couldn't produce the sound of the dog's master's voice because you could only make home recordings on a cylinder, not a disc in those days. So the painting became the trademark of The Gramophone Company, which put "His Master's Voice" on the record label in England, and also of the Victor Talking Maching Company, its American affiliate, which became RCA Victor. You might see some old records with that painting on the label.