19th Century

Jean-Baptiste Bio

Early 1800s

experimented with how sound travels through long tubes, using the water pipes of Paris, and found that the confines of the piping served to keep speech intelligible over a good 1040 yards, compared to how well sound carried in free space. Increase the diameter of those pipes, however, and there would be a corresponding decrease in intelligibility.

Antonio Meucci

1860 – 1890

built an acoustic speaking tube system in his home, similar to the pipes used for communication on ships.

William Elliott

1849

conducted a series of measurements to determine the quality of the sound transmission, in terms of intelligible human speech.

Thomas Edison

1877

wanted to design a machine capable of transcribing telegraphic messages by using a stylus to make indentations on a paper sheet in response to sound vibrations.

Emile Berliner & David Edward Hughes

1870s – 1880s

David Edward Hughes invented a carbon microphone in the 1870s. The first microphone that enabled proper voice telephony was the (loose-contact) carbon microphone (then called transmitter). This was independently developed by David Edward Hughes in England and Emile Berliner.

Other Sound-related Inventions and contributions in the 19th century:

* 1857, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph.

* 1877, Charles Cros, suggested that the process could be reversed by using photoengraving to convert the traced line into a groove that would guide the stylus.

* 1887, Emile Berliner, photoengraved a phonautograph recording into metal and played it back.

* 1877, Thomas Edison, the phonograph was a device with a cylinder covered with an impressionable material such as tin foil, lead, or wax on which a stylus etched grooves.

* Gramophone (phonograph in American English), which was patented by Emile Berliner in 1887