The phonograph, or gramophone, was 
the most common device for playing recorded sound from the 1870s 
through the 1980s. Usage of these terms is somewhat different in 
American English and British English; see usage note below. In more 
modern usage, this device is often called a turntable or record player. 
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the alternative term talking 
machine was sometimes used. The phonograph was the first device for 
recording and replaying sound.

The term phonograph means "writing sound", a term coined from Greek 
roots. Similar related terms gramophone and graphophone mean the 
same thing. Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce 
recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common 
practice it is usually only used to refer to certain historic 
technologies of sound recording.

History

The phonautograph

The earliest known invention of a phonographic recording device was 
the phonautograph, invented by Leon Scott and patented on March 25, 
1857. It could transcribe sound to a visible medium, but had no 
means to play back the sound after it was recorded. The device 
consisted of a horn that focused sound waves onto a membrane to 
which a hog's bristle was attached, causing the bristle to move 
and enabling it to inscribe a visual medium. Initially, the 
phonautograph made recordings onto a lamp-blackened glass plate. 
A later version used a medium of lamp-blackened paper on a drum 
or cylinder—an arrangement to which Thomas Edison's later 
invention would bear striking resemblance. Other versions would 
draw a line representing the sound wave on to a roll of paper. 
The phonautograph was a laboratory curiosity for the study of 
acoustics. It was used to determine the vibrations per second 
for a musical pitch and to study sound and speech; it was not 
widely understood until after the development of the phonograph 
that the waveform recorded by the phonautograph was a record of 
the sound wavelength that needed only a playback mechanism to 
reproduce the sound.

The first phonograph

Thomas Alva Edison announced his invention of the first phonograph, 
a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 
and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 
(he patented it on February 19, 1878; US Pat. No. 200,521). 
Edison's early phonographs recorded on a phonograph cylinder 
using up-down (vertical) motion of the stylus. Edison's early 
patents show that he also considered that sound could also be 
recorded as a spiral on a disc, but Edison concentrated his 
efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a 
rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus 
in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically 
correct".

The first gramophone

Emile Berliner invented what he called the Gramophone, another 
device for recording and replaying sound, and patented it in on 
November 8, 1887 (US Pat. No 372,786). It recorded on a disk 
using side-to-side (lateral) motion of the stylus.