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Before explaining how a phonograph, or gramophone, works we must first understand what sound is and how our ears perceive sound. Sound is a vibration moving through a medium like air or water and can be heard when it reaches a person or animal’s ear. (Cool fact: in outer space, there is no sound because there is nothing that can vibrate and produce sound).
Although invisible, sound moves through the air like ripples caused by a stone thrown into a pond. Our ears perceive sound with the help of our eardrum, which is like a very thin foil that vibrates with the sound that is moving it, passing that vibration to the ear’s mechanism which then sends messages to our brain and translates those messages into thoughts to tell us what we hear.
The phonograph works in a very similar way. There have been a lot of phonograph models and mechanisms but the most popular is the one with a disc which can be made from wax, metal, plastic or other materials, a needle or something similar that can vibrate, and a horn that amplifies the sound so we can hear it.
The first phonograph was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and had a different mechanism than the one we’ve already mentioned but the way it creates sound is basically the same. For now, let’s refer only to the one involving a disc, a needle, and a horn because it is the most popular and still exists today in pretty much the same since it was invented. We’ve mentioned earlier that sound is a vibration through the air, or other mediums, so for a phonograph to work we need a source that produces the vibration, something that picks up the vibration, and something that transforms that vibration into an audible sound that reaches our ears.
The first component of a phonograph is the disc and regardless of what it is made of the principle remains the same. If we looked at the disc with a microscope, we would see that on its surface there are a lot of hills and valleys like the ones you see on a bumpy road or like the ripples in a pond that we talked about earlier. The needle touches the surface of the disc and follows the hills and valleys engraved in it. Each time the needle hits a bump or falls in a hole it vibrates thus producing a very small sound that almost can’t be heard. If it hits a lot of bumps and valleys it vibrates faster and produces a high-pitched sound, if it hits wider valleys and bumps it vibrates slower and produces a low-pitched sound.
So, our phonograph is almost complete but as we’ve talked about earlier the sound that the needle produces is almost inaudible. We need something to help our needle produce a bigger sound, so we can hear it. So now comes the last part of our phonograph which helps the needle to do this: the horn. As you probably know, a horn is very narrow at one end and wide at the other. It works in a similar way to the needle; it vibrates and produces a sound that reaches our eardrum. The narrow end of the horn receives vibrations from the needle, through the needle arm. As sound travels through the horn and goes to the wider end, it gets louder and louder and when it finally reaches the end the sound is loud enough so our ears can hear it, making it possible for us to hear what is recorded on the disc. Vinyl discs still exist today and are still popular.
Although many years have passed since the invention of the gramophone, the only thing missing from this device is the horn, when compared to the older phonograph. We now enjoy the benefits of electricity and the modern “gramophone” does not have the horn anymore because the vibrations produced by a needle are translated into electricity and carried on to an amplifier, so we can hear what is playing on our speakers. So there is our horn, it’s now a speaker.
