AHC: Phonograph appears the same decade as the first permanent photograph

Myrtonos

The first permanent photograph appeared in the mid 1820s. If the phonograph had been invented in the same decade, it would have been a century before electrical recording instead of only 30-40 years. Just imagine that.
It also wouldn't be as ironic if you think about it. Photogarphy requries a light sensitve material, where as purely mechancal sound recording is as simple as cutting a groove with a needle attatched to a horn loaded diaphram.
 

Byzantion

Myrtonos said:
The first permanent photograph appeared in the mid 1820s. If the phonograph had been invented in the same decade, it would have been a century before electrical recording instead of only 30-40 years. Just imagine that.
It also wouldn't be as ironic if you think about it. Photogarphy requries a light sensitve material, where as purely mechancal sound recording is as simple as cutting a groove with a needle attatched to a horn loaded diaphram.
Click to expand...

then we might hear (in case, the technology becomes more available and better, took the photograph until the 1860es to really take of , right) soundfiles from the first half of the 19th century. would also be interesting, to see a developement of photography in the 1790es.
 

GeographyDude

This is what I love about alt hist! Maybe it's that the photograph was merely one cognitive step, even if it was difficult technologically. Whereas the groove cut on the rotating disk, the needle riding lightly, some kind of speakers providing amplification, etc., were several cognitive steps, even if none of them all that difficult technologically.

Plus, maybe it was envisioned that the eventual sound produced would be tinny or otherwise unsatisfying, and perhaps that was pretty nonmotivating to early dreams that this might be possible.
 

Myrtonos

Mechancally reproduced sound

Actually, no powered amplifiers were involved in acoustical recording. It was simply recorded with a large horn and a cutting stylus. Reproduction of sound was also purely mechanical, just a simple horn loaded diaphram with a stylus attatched, with the exception of the Auxetophone, which amplified sound using compressed air.
I imagine that compressed air amplification would also have had a longer run before electric amplification if the phonograph had appeared earlier.
 

David T

"There is no reason why the phonograph could not have been invented earlier - much earlier - than it was. The first successful model of 1877 contained no new or sophisticated materials, only parts well known to amateur scientists and mechanics: a rotating drum, a short screw-thread, a vibrating diaphragm, and a sharp stylus. However, no one found the combination obvious. .." http://www.musesmuse.com/recording-art.html
 

Myrtonos

Indeed, hence the idea of an alternate history when it appeared much earlier and also had a longer run before electrical recording.
 
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1940LaSalle

I could see someone like Samuel Morse experimenting a bit with materials at hand (perhaps a shellac-coated cardboard or wood cylinder, or a gutta percha cylinder), yielding the gramophone in the late 1840s or so. It's possible cylinders (by then, made of vulcanized rubber) of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address might still exist in the Smithsonian or be found tucked away in the recesses of an attic somewhere. All the parts were there; nobody had the "aha" moment of putting them together until Edison did just after the Centennial.
 

Myrtonos

Let's get it straight

So all the parts for acoustical recording were there, probably since the industrial revolution, but nobody seemed to put them together until thirty odd years or so before electrical recording, which in turn did contain parts unknown or then only recently known to amateur scientists.
 
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