New facts about common things. A portrait of a voice.

Date of publication: 12.01.1983
Article persistent address: http://en.naro-fominsk.net/news/detail/1167.phtml
Print version: http://en.naro-fominsk.net/news/print/1167.phtml

The guestbook, kept by All-Union Record Company Melodia, contains a record: "What an artistically delicate work - to make a portrait of a voice… A piece of me will remain immortal. A.S. Serafimovich, 1936.

"Today almost in every house you can find black varnished disks; in their grooves recorded sounds continue their life…

A wax coated phono-cylinder which was a sound recording medium of Edison's phonograph is considered to be the prototype of a disc. The first track ever was recorded in 1877. French poet, musician and scientist Charles Cros is supposed to be an inventor of mechanical recording and sound recording principles. Ten years later sound recording system became more perfect. Right then disks and the gramophone of a German scientist Emile Berliner appeared.

At first disks were produced by pressure of a mould to a warmed up celluloid disk. But this material did not meet expectations. They tried to replace it by rubber resin and hard rubber. At last, was found a mass, consisting of soot, spar and organic pitch (shellac). This content turned out to be the most suitable and long-lasting. Russian engineer B. Yakobi worked out an electroforming method of making a copy from the original.

Native sound recording is 85 years old. The first Russian disks were recorded in 1897. Among those, who made performances beside recording machines long long ago, were L. Tolstoy, V. Komissarzhevskaya, M. Savina, L. Sobinov. F. Chaliapin had about 200 records!

The factory for disk and playback equipment producing was founded in Riga in 1902. One year later the first recording and disk producing company under the name “V.I. Rebikov and Co. Fellowship” was created in Saint-Petersburg.

In the first decade of this century music admirers have received a new playback equipment- a patephone. It turned out to be compact and easy-to-use, it lacked a loudspeaker either. A word “patephone” is derived from a company's name “Pate” and a word “phone”, which denotes a sound. Russian inventor F. Manii was working in Pate company. He was a person who offered a construction of a patephone.

A great event of Russian cultural life was opening of a disk producing company in the village Aprelevka near Moscow in 1910. Citizens possessed a great amount of gramophones; their quantity reached about a half of a million.

Exhibits of a unique museum, which was founded in a civic centre of Lenin's Aprelevskiy order of a disk producing plant, tell us the history of native sound recording.

Nowadays Melodia enterprises produce more than 200 million disks annually.