The Phonograph

The famous phonograph was the fourth device for recording and replaying sound. The term phonograph ("sound writer") is derived from the Greek words φωνή (meaning "sound" or "voice" and transliterated as phonē) and γραφή (meaning "writing" and transliterated as graphē). Similar related terms gramophone and graphophone have similar root meanings. The coinage, particularly the use of the -graph root, may have been influenced by the then-existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers' Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings.

F.B.Fenby was the original author of the word. An inventor in Massachusetts, he was granted a patent in 1863 for an unsuccessful device called the "Electro-Magnetic Phonograph". His concept detailed a system that would record a sequence of keyboard strokes onto paper tape. Although no model or workable device was ever made, it is often seen as a link to the concept of punched paper for player piano rolls (1880s), as well as the famous punch card tabulator (used in the 1890 U.S. Census), a distant precursor of the modern computer.

Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice it has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the alternative term talking machine was sometimes used. This term was more in line with Thomas Edison's early view that his invention was better suited for spoken recordings such as dictation than for musical recordings.

United Kingdom

Gramophone refers 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 1960s onwards the more common term would be record player or turntable as part of a system that also played cassettes and included radio. Such a system would be called a hi-fi or stereo

United States

In America, phonograph was the most common generic term for any early sound reproducing machine, until the second half of the 20th century, when it became archaic and record player became the universal term for disc record machines. In contemporary American usage phonograph most usually refers to disc record machines or turntables, the most common type of analogue recording from the 1910s on.

Gramophone was a U.S. brand name, Emile Berliner's Gramophone was considered a type of phonograph.The brand name Gramophone was not used in the USA after 1901, and the word fell out of use there, though it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the title of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm.