I was watching the movie “against the ice” and they had a record player in 1909 deep in Greenland with 0 electricity, but the record player still played. I understand that it’s a movie, but I can’t see them just having a place with no electricity playing a record player. Do these actually exist? And if so, how?
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The first record players were wind up. There is a crank in the side which you use to wind up a spring. This spring is connected to the turntable through a regulator making sure the speed is correct. In 1909 this was the most common type of record player sold. Electrically driven record players were more of a luxury item. These did not become common until the late 30s. And even then the wind up record players sold well into the 60s and 70s.
A phonograph is actually a surprisingly simple device. If you look at one closely, you’ll notice that compared to a ‘modern’ record player, the tone arm (which sits on the surface of the record) is a lot chunkier. This is because the tone arm of pre-electric phonographs contain the actual membrane that vibrates to produce sound – no electronic speakers needed. Rather, the needle is directly connected to the membrane, and the vibrations produced as the needle is moved over the surface of the record vibrate the membrane directly. The tone arm has a tube in it that conveys the sound made by the membrane to a big horn that amplifies it. All the energy needed to power the device is provided by the crank and spring assembly that rotates the record.
This setup has some problems. Because the tone arm weighs a lot and is pressing on the record, if the needle were durable, it would wear out the records quite quickly. So instead, these phonographs had needles that would wear down over time and need to be replaced between play sessions. The sound of the needle rubbing on the record is also pretty significant compared to an electric player, so you would usually need to close the top of the machine while playing, or just live with the constant scratching noise. Also, there’s no stereo sound, because there isn’t any way to vibrate a single membrane two different ways. And the sound quality is pretty rough, but it was the only thing available, so people put up with it.
One of the odd aspects of record phonograph history is that there is an inherent problem to records on discs that was ‘solved’, but then turned out to not actually matter. See, on a rotating disc, parts of the disc closer to the center are moving faster than those towards the edge. One would imagine that with a constant playback speed, this would create problems – the parts towards the center would have less space per the same unit of time to on which to record sound than the edge, so it would have lower theoretical sound fidelity. Thomas Edison knew about this problem and this is one of the reasons he went with cylinders instead of discs for his phonograph – the spiral groove on a cylinder has a constant speed, so it avoids this problem. But it turned out that the fidelity of early records wasn’t good enough anyway for this problem to really matter, and discs just had so many advantages – they could be recorded to on both sides, and were easier to far easier to store – that Edison’s cylinder format was quickly discarded.
That is the original gramophone/phonograph. LPs and vinyl are mechanically encoded (not magnetic or electronic). The grooves on the record replicate the vibrations needed to make the recorded sound. A needle moving in this groove vibrates and that vibration is sent through a horn (all mechanical) which amplifies the vibration to make a sound. The sound won’t be very loud (so definitely not like any movie reconstruction) so the listener would have to be fairly close to the horn.
the groove carved in the record *is* the vibrations from the recorded sound. the needle rides in the groove and that causes it to vibrate.
from there, it’s just a matter of making it loud enough to hear. old phonographs would have the needle attached to a diaphragm , and the diaphragm projected the sound outward through the horn.
I used to listen to 78’s on my grandparents Victrola. By experimentation, it showed me how easy a concept records are. I noticed that I could run my fingernail in the grove and hear the music in the vibrations. Then I realized I could stick a needle through a cone of paper and make it loud enough to hear. It’s easy to understand how they work then. The sound goes acoustically through the tone arm to the speakers in the cabinet.
Then later I found out the story behind “His master’s voice.” and I was sad.
Regardless, holy crap are the big standup Victrola’s loud. Even with the doors shut, they are aggressively noisy. You can do about 3 sides without re-cranking the mainspring. Maybe you could get more duration when the spring was new.
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