La Phonogalerie

Gramophones and stacks of records at La Phonogalerie, Paris.

I went on a guided tour this week of the "Phonogalerie", a centre for gramophones, records, and all things to do with the history of recorded sound. When you walk into Monsieur Aro's "Phonogalerie", a large light-filled showroom near Pigalle Metro, the first thing that strikes you is the sheer number of beautiful gramophones. The horns, the gramophone's most prominent part, are everywhere, attached to machines, stacked in piles, or encased in elaborate wooden cabinetry. They are mostly made of metal, but some are wood, and there is even a glass one. Some are large, flaring out like the petals of a petunia flower. Others are slim and streamlined, like tall pointy witch hats. One model, used at a World's Fair, did not have a horn, but instead, had many headphones attached. 

A wax cylinder gramophone with many headphones (white dangling tubes).

Monsieur Aro quizzed us: Who was the first person to invent a machine to record and play back sound? Everyone else on the guided tour was silent so of course I blurted out “Thomas Edison.” Wrong! It was not the American Edison, said M. Aro with a satisfied smile, but the Frenchman Charles Cros who was the first person to invent such a machine. Cros had written a note to the French Academy of Sciences, explaining the concept, but was so disappointed with the lack of interest that he then moved on to other projects. 

A glass horn. The beige cylinder to the lower right behind the horn is the wax cylinder used to record and reproduce sound.

           Edison was the first to patent his invention, and to make it commercially successful. We got to listen to music from the early 1900s recorded on a wax cylinder, before the invention of flat recording discs. We also heard music from the “Regina Hexaphone” jukebox (a nickel a song), and a song from a vinyl record played on a gramophone. All of us sighed that it brought back many happy childhood memories of listening to records.