A hundred years ago gramophone record technology made a breakthrough with electrical recording. The wax master disc was still stamped out mechanically – but the recorded sound could now be amplified, filtered and balanced electronically and the process was under way that would lead to LPs and CDs and all the digital forms of today. Prof. Tom Stevenson tells the story, with recorded examples.

In association with Orkney Wireless Museum and the Museum of Communication at Burntisland, Fife.

You can take a virtual tour of the Wireless Museum, and read about it here as well. You can read about the Museum of Communication here too.

The Great 78 Project was set up to preserve the estimated 3 million sides recorded on 78 rpm discs from about 1898 to the 1950s, and now has over 400,000 recordings. You can listen online to them – on His Master’s Voice and Parlophone, Peerless and Beltona, from Woody Guthrie to Homer Rodeheaver and Wood Brothers Quartet, from Vincent Lopez and his Hotel Pennsylvania Orchestra to Robert Frost reading his own poems.