An early Thomas Edison tinfoil phonograph.
The stylus indented the sounds while recording on a strip of tinfoil.
Audio recorded on a strip of tinfoil; it was similar to what would occur later on vinyl.
An early Thomas Edison tinfoil phonograph. A stylus (shown also in close-up) indented the sounds while recording on a strip of tinfoil like this one. It was similar to what would occur later on vinyl.
The phonograph and the player piano together brought technological musical reproduction into the home in the early 1900s. Both symbolized the shift from music-making -- friends and family singing around the piano -- to spectatorship and consumption.
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, but believed its main uses would be for office work, education and recording memories, not music. The first recordings were made on metal cylinders. In 1887 German-American inventor Emile Berliner invented the flat shellac disk, quickly saw its advantage for mass production, and patented a device to play them, the gramophone, that same year.
In 1897, American inventor Edwin S. Votey invented the "Pianola," a self-playing piano whose perforated paper rolls functioned much like computer punch cards. The player piano and the phonograph not only introduced recorded music to a mass audience, they also prepared the way for machines to become integrated into musical creation.
The microphone
In 1877, Berliner, then working with Edison, created the first "telephone voice transmitter," a device that used a vibrating metal diaphragm to convert sound waves into electrical signals for transmission over telephone lines. In 1916, engineer E.C. Wente invented the condenser microphone for Western Electric. Wente's invention captured a wider range of sound with less noise, paving the way for national radio networks and professional recording studios.
The microphone also led to the creation of a conversational vocal style, creating an aesthetic of intimacy. The crooner Rudy Vallee embraced the microphone as an instrument that enabled listeners to hear him as if he were singing directly into their ears. By the early 1930s, Bing Crosby had created a distinctively American vocal style -- low-key, expressive -- which was adapted by Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. The singer became the star. The microphone also transformed acting in Hollywood films, ushering out loud voices trained to project in theaters.
Sound-on-film
In the early 1920s, inventor and electrical engineer Lee de Forest collaborated with chemist Theodore Case to create the first sound-on-film system, PhonoFilm. Yet when De Forest rented a theater in 1923 to demonstrate several sound shorts, studio heads showed no interest. The adoption of sound would require a transformation of the industry's economic structure: Theaters would need to be wired, sound studios would need to be built, foreign sales would fall off a cliff.
Audiences, however, eventually demanded the shift. In 1927 the studios were stunned by the success of "The Jazz Singer," the first "talkie," and the silent-film business quickly collapsed. Several competing processes of sound-on-film fought for dominance until Western Electric created the industry standard by recording picture and sound separately then marrying them onto a single print. This process lasted until the advent of direct-to-digital filming, pioneered by George Lucas for the fifth "Star Wars" movie released, "Attack of the Clones," in 2002. By 2013, more movies were being shot digitally than on celluloid.
The jukebox
Inventor Louis Glass and engineer William S. Arnold created the original coin-in-the-slot phonograph in 1889: It played one song on a metal disk or cylinder. It took the combination of shellac discs, electronic amplification and an automatic record-changer for National Automatic Music Company to manufacture the first 20-song multiplay machines in 1927. Black bar owners were early adopters and patrons called it the jukebox, the music machine playing down at the "juke joint."
Jukeboxes helped save the music industry when record sales tanked during the Great Depression and people sought inexpensive entertainment after the repeal of Prohibition. Jukeboxes were central to the swing-music youth culture of the 1930s, a period when the term "teenager" was coined.
The jukebox was also a form of American soft power in Europe after World War II, reflecting the taste of GIs and influencing European radio stations to play more English-language popular music, especially blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll. The jukebox remains associated with early rock 'n' roll, and the iconic sitcom "Happy Days" rolls its intro and credits over a jukebox while teenagers dance. In the 1980s, jukeboxes with 45s gave way to CD jukeboxes, then a generation later,to streaming ones.
TV
The self-trained engineer Philo Farnsworth built the first all-electronic TV system in 1927 using his "image dissector," which converted the picture into electric current. While many Americans first experienced television at the New York World's Fair of 1939-40, there was little programming before 1950. By 1960, though, 90% of households owned a TV -- one of the fastest adoptions of technology in history -- and it became the center of American domestic life.
TV helped create a centralized national culture through a shared viewing experience of three national networks; millions of Americans watched the same shows, news broadcasts and historical events. Television was also the leading edge of the rising consumer society: an ad-driven medium running all day in American homes.
Electric guitar
Engineer Adolph Rickenbacker and musician George Beauchamp patented the first electric lap steel guitar in 1931, called the "frying pan" because of its shape, in an attempt to level up the instrument's volume in big bands. What made that possible was a "pickup," essentially a magnet mounted under the strings that turned vibrations into an electric current that connects to an amplifier.
Other manufacturers followed. In 1951, Leo Fender—a California designer and manufacturer of musical instruments—built and sold the first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar, the Telecaster. Fender’s guitars had a distinctive bright, twangy sound and futuristic styling. The electric guitar became a key element in rock ‘n’ roll and ultimately a symbol of America (think Hard Rock Cafe). The instrument also paved the way to an aesthetics of electricity—feedback, distortion, fuzz, sheer volume—that led to such genres as heavy metal, punk, grunge and shoegaze.
VCR
Ampex invented the first videotape recorder for professional use in 1956, a $50,000 machine that CBS used to tape and broadcast reruns. The subsequent invention of the cassette tape set the stage in the 1980s for both the VHS vs. Betamax battle and a Supreme Court copyright case over recording TV programs for later use.
The VCR transformed Americans from passive viewers into active curators of their entertainment, laying the groundwork for everything from mixtapes to Netflix. VCRs were a Trojan horse in the American home that kicked off a rebellion against the centralized entertainment of the big three networks and movie-theater chains. The VCR was also the leading edge of a cluster of inexpensive consumer electronics in the 1980s that transformed domestic life: the Walkman, answering machines, videogames, video cameras and PCs.
CGI
When George Lucas first watched rushes of computer-generated dinosaurs interacting with human actors in Steven Spielberg's 1993 "Jurassic Park," he recalled, "It was like one of those moments in history, like the invention of the lightbulb or the first telephone call." Animator John Whitney used an early computer to produce images for Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" in 1958, but the breakthrough into cinematic world-building came in the 1990s with "Terminator 2" and "Toy Story." Fully computer-animated films followed, along with fully digital nonhuman characters such as Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings" and the Na'vi from "Avatar."
Artificial intelligence is now used to de-age actors and to generate dense, textured landscapes. The technology's capacity to render an actor's image has led to copyright issues concerning likenesses, a key aspect of the actors' strike in 2024.
The smartphone
In 1994, International Business Machines electronics designer Frank Canova invented the first smartphone, the Simon. It was a work phone with a small touch screen, email and fax capabilities and a scheduler; it weighed a full pound. The BlackBerry 5810 was the next step, providing internet capability and an external headset. In 2007, Apple's iPhone created a global consumer revolution. Within a decade of its release, 80% of Americans owned smartphones.
Streaming
RealNetworks pioneered streaming audio and video with its RealAudio software in 1995. Once Microsoft and Apple began providing free video players with their PC software, however, along with the arrival of the MP3 format, RealNetworks' business model collapsed.
In 2007, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings moved Netflix away from physical rentals with an accessible, intuitive user interface to stream movies and TV shows. Around the same time, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion barely a year after its launch; by which time the platform averaged 100 million views a day. Google kept the company's original YouTube Partner Program allowing creators to earn money from ads on their videos practically creating new category of influencer. The streaming wars peaked during pandemic with Americans captive audience for two years. Today's dominant global streaming platform is YouTube—an advanced TV set programmed by you.