Gramophone
Related: phonograph - turntable - records - sound - playback
The phonograph, or gramophone, was the most common device for playing recorded sound from the 1870s through the 1980s. In more modern usage, this device is often called the turntable or record player. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the alternative term talking machine was sometimes used. [May 2006]
Era: 1870s - 1880s - 1890s - 1900s - 1910s - 1920s - 1930s - 1940s - 1950s - 1960s - 1970s - 1980s
Walter Benjamin said of gramophone records: ’enabling the original to meet the beholder halfway’. -- (Walter Benjamin, 1935)
1900 advertisement for Berliner Gram-o-phone
In British English "gramophone" came to refer to any sound reproducing machine using disc records, as disc records were popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. The term "phonograph" is usually restricted to devices playing cylinder records. The term "gramophone" would generally be taken to refer to a wind-up machine, and from the 1960's onwards the more common term would be "record player" or "stereo" for a complete system (most systems were stereophonic by the mid-1960's), and "turntable" for an individual component of a system that played not only records but included other sources. --source [May 2006]
Analogue disc record
The analogue disc record was the main technology used for storing recorded sound in the 20th century. Its common names included gramophone record (British English), phonograph record (American English), record, album, disc, black disc, vinyl, and (more informally) platter or sides. The name was often prepended with the extra longplay or long play, which lent it the acronym LP (a trademark of Columbia Records, soon adopted into common parlance) --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_disc_record, Mar 2004See also: popular music - repetition
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) - Friedrich A. Kittler
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) - Friedrich A. Kittler [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Card catalog description
Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, past theoretical discussion of the responses to these media - including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators - Gramphone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, and the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies.
[...]
Figures engaged in technocritical scholarship and theory include Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour (who work in the closely related field of science studies), N. Katherine Hayles (who works in the field of Literature and Science), Phil Agre and Mark Poster (who work in the closely related field of information studies), Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich A. Kittler (who work in the closely related field of media studies), Susan Squier and Richard Doyle (who work in the closely related field of biomedical studies), and Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault (critical theorists and philosophers who sometimes wrote about technology). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocriticism [May 2006]
See also: gramophone - film - modernism - new media - technology