Did Thomas Edison invent the gramophone?

Answer 1

The answer is yes...and no.

Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the first machine which could record sound and play it back. He called this device a 'phongraph', which essentially means sound writing. The phonograph, though a bit of a sensation at the time, was never commercially produced on any large scale, and remained a parlor trick when Edison basically abandoned it when he began work on his electric light.

In the meantime, other inventors, namely Alexander Graham Bell and others, began working on their own improved versions of the device. Bell's group (later known as Columbia) called their device a 'graphophone' (not particularly original, wouldn't you say? Rather than Edison's tinfoil wrapped cylinder, they used a wax cylinder to record. Much better, sound could actually be reliably reproduced, but it still had it's drawbacks. One of those was the need to individually record each cylinder, there was originally no method for mass producing them.

Around this time, Edison returned to the field with his 'improved phonograph', using the same wax technology of his competitors.

Finally, an inventor named Emile Berliner devised what he called the 'gram-o-phone'. The gramophone used flat disc shaped records of a shellac material. More durable, and with one bi advantage: the records could be stamped out in large volume.

So short answer is that Edison first demonstrated the recording of sound, but Berliner's later machine has much more in common with what became the standard record player

Answer 2

No, Thomas Edison did not invent the gramophone. The gramophone was invented by Emile Berliner in 1887. However, Thomas Edison did invent the phonograph, a device that could both record and play back sound.