Hello, and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 494, His Master's Voice.

Last week, we talked about a pair of technologies, the telegraph and landline telephone, which

were hugely influential in their day, but which in this day and age have largely fallen

by the technological wayside. I have to say I expected much the same to happen with our subject

this week, but thanks in large part to hipsters everywhere, the record player is still going strong.

The phonograph, as it was originally named, though it has also been called a gramophone,

a record player, and more recently a turntable, is in terms of the physics behind it pretty

straightforward.

Sound, as we all recall from high school physics class, is created by the vibration of air

molecules and can be charted in a waveform.

The records and record players are essentially spiraled grooves etched into a malleable surface, with the shape

of those grooves reflecting the waveform of a recorded sound. To play it back, you place a needle

at the start of the groove, and as the needle moves through the spiraled groove, it vibrates

in tune with the pattern of said groove, faintly reproducing the sound, which can then be amplified.

The original patent for the phonograph, filed by the American inventor Thomas Edison

on December 24, 1877, and accepted on February 18th of the next year, relied on playback

using a horn that amplified the sound, and made use of wax phonographed

cylinders as the recording medium.

As the decades went on, the technology was steadily improved, moving from cylinders

to flat discs which were easier to store, improving the drive system of the turntable,

refining the design of the needle for more accurate playback, and of course

improving the sound systems it could be hooked into. Thankfully, as far as I know, hipsters have

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