Today's compact disks, MTV videos, and Internet music websites all trace their ancestry to technologies developed in the late nineteenth century. Along with the movies and nationally distributed magazines, recorded music laid the groundwork for an American mass culture in the early twentieth century, and helped build support for the U.S. war effort in 1917-1918.

Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice in 1877. (Historians differ over whether the first recorded words were "Halloo," in July or "Mary had a little lamb" in December.) The following year, Edison patented a "phonograph" utilizing cylinders wrapped in tin foil. Other inventors patented recording machinery involving wax-coated cylinders, which proved superior to tin foil. The first known recorded musical performance was by an eleven-year-old pianist, Josef Hoffmann, in Edison's laboratory in New Jersey in 1887.

Emile Berliner patented a new technique of recording on disks in 1887, and disks quickly proved superior to cylinders. In a critical breakthrough, Berliner also developed a technique for mass producing hard-rubber records from a zinc master disk.

In sound reproduction by means of a phonograph, the sound being recorded is converted to electrical impulses, which in turn create slight mechanical variations in circular grooves on a rotating master disk. When a record manufactured from the master disk is played, a stylus, or needle, attached to a tone arm tracks the circular grooves, converting the variations back into electrical signals that are amplified and converted into sound by a loudspeaker.

The new technology became commercially available in 1890 when the Columbia Phonograph Company published a catalog of cylinder recordings. By 1894 Emile Berliner's U.S. Gramophone Company was selling around a thousand phonographs and some twenty-five thousand records a year, including hymns, classical works, and popular songs. The United States Marine Band conducted by John Philip Sousa was an early favorite. The first commercial jazz record, "Livery Stable Blues," appeared in 1917, recorded by a white New Orleans group called the Original Dixieland Jass [sic] Band. The Sears Roebuck catalog, widely distributed in rural and small-town America in the early twentieth century, devoted several pages to "talking machines" on which buyers could play commercially produced records or make their own recordings.

In 1900 Eldridge Johnson bought Emile Berliner's company and formed what soon became the industry leader, the Victor Talking Machine Company. Six years later Victor marketed the Victrola, a handsome cabinet-style phonograph that proved so popular that "Victrola" became a generic name for all record players. The earliest phonographs had amplified the sound by a large and rather unsightly external speaker horn. The Victrola concealed the horn inside the cabinet, making the unit more attractive for the living room or parlor. The "volume control" had two settings: open the cabinet doors to increase the volume, close them to reduce it.

Early Victrolas were expensive, ranging from $75 for the cheapest table model to far more luxurious models featuring exotic woods, lacquer finishes, and painted decorations. Despite the prices, annual sales reached 573,000 by 1917. Although electric-powered Victrolas became available in 1913, most buyers preferred the hand-cranked model well into the 1920s.

Records made of laminated shellac with a paper core (1906) and then of Condensite, an early form of plastic, introduced in 1913, proved more durable than the older hard-rubber disks, with less surface noise. The first vinyl records did not appear until 1929.

The American home front during World War I resonated to the sound of patriotic music blaring from thousands of Victrolas and phonographs produced by rival companies. War songs ranged from the sentimental, such as the waltz "Till We Meet Again," to novelty numbers, including "Oo-La-La Wee, Wee"; the tongue-twister "Sister Susie's Sewing Shirts for Soldiers," and Irving Berlin's comic soldier's lament "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning."

Other songs were rousingly patriotic, such as "America, I Love You" and George M. Cohan's 1917 hit "Over There." Born in Rhode Island in 1878, Cohan appeared in vaudeville as a child with his parents and sister in "The Four Cohans" and went on to became a successful producer of Broadway musicals.

"Over There," pledging America to fight to the end, became the unofficial anthem of the war. With many Americans opposed to U.S. intervention, prowar songs played an important propaganda role, and Cohan received a Congressional citation for his song. In September 1918 the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso sang "Over There," popularized by his earlier recording of the song, before a huge audience in New York's Central Park.

In the nineteenth century, new songs had been introduced by music-hall performers and then sold in sheet-music form, allowing families and social groups to sing them at home around the piano. Sheet music remained popular, but by 1917-1918 the recording industry was firmly established, and many thousands of phonograph owners purchased recordings of popular wartime songs for repeated listening at home.

By the war's end, American popular music was firmly linked to the recording technology pioneered by Edison, Berliner, Johnson, and others. Early records were played mainly in the home, but with the coming of radio in the 1920s, recordings of classical music and popular songs could reach a mass audience simultaneously.

By the middle of the twentieth century, phonographs and phonograph records, incorporating many technological advances, played a huge role in American popular culture, accounting for millions of dollars in annual sales and spreading the fame of recording artists from Ella Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles.