Ever since 1877, when Thomas Edison made a tinfoil recording of himself saying the children's rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb," inventors have strived to create better methods of preserving sounds and music. Americans have always been quick to adapt to each new advance in recording technology.

The earliest phonograph recordings were of poor quality and could only be played once. Alexander Graham Bell devised a "graphophone" with wax cylinders that could be played many times, but they couldn't be mass-produced. Then, in 1887, Emile Berliner invented a system where many copies could be made from one original. The "gramophone," available to the public beginning 1897, played flat "shellac" disks at about 78 revolutions per minute.

Edison and others were still devoted to cylinders, however, and a process for mass-producing them was developed in 1901. Cylinder recordings were manufactured as late as 1929, a decade after 78 rpm records overtook them as the most popular format.

In 1935, the first magnetic tape was created. Early tape recorders used the "reel-to-reel" format; the "compact cassette" didn't come along until the early 1960s.

The LP (long-playing) record was invented in 1947. Their longer playing time and better quality almost immediately made the brittle 78 rpm records obsolete. LP records, also known as "vinyl" records (actually made of polyvinyl chloride plastic), played at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. A smaller and faster (45 rpm) format was used for singles.

In 1965, the 8-track tape was introduced. Although it enjoyed more than a decade of relative popularity (particularly in car stereos), this format completely faded out by 1980.

In 1982, the compact disc first appeared in music stores, and rapidly superseded the LP. Read by a laser, CDs can hold 74 minutes of music on a disc 12 cm in diameter. Today, CDs are also widely used for storing computer data.

Today, personal music players like Apple's iPod can store up to 10,000 songs in a device smaller than a deck of cards. Such players use MP3 technology, which compresses CD-quality digital files into much smaller files that can easily be downloaded, copied, and shared via the Internet.

The advent of MP3 and other digital compression formats has fundamentally changed the way Americans collect and listen to music. As of 2002, over half of all Americans had listened to a prerecorded CD on their home computer, and nearly one third had listened to MP3 files. However, just as sharing music has become easier, so have ethical dilemmas involving copyright and "fair use" become more difficult.

Considering the many changes in music recording over the past century, who can predict what the next generation will bring?

By Jeff Richards