When did phonographs become popular in Europe?

Question

At what point did almost every house have one, with cheap records being produced? What was the situation between 1900 and 1918?

Answer 1

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Define Cheap - - - and who wants Cheap? Early Phonographs sounded like cr^p despite the novelty and not every house wanted one. However Edison and his associates were agressive and managed to make the tin cyclinder variety a househould item by about 1900 in France, lagging behind the US of A by nearly fifteen years, and Britain by about five.....
As phonographic discs beacame available right around 1900, then tin cyclinders were drumped on the market much like Beta and now VHS tapes so they can be said to be 'cheap' by 1900. Actual round records familiar to anyone older than twenty, became 'cheap' right after World War One, thus by 1920 'everyone' could have a record player, usually a wind up model, and perhaps a few records..

(old movies testify to the sudden availibility of phonographs during the 1920 s - - - again even if the same five records were all that one owned)

A note about the price of records... Raputsin's assassins had only ONE record which they played over & over & over while they sodomised & murdered the 'Mad Monk.' Makes one wonder how expensive records were in St Petersberg in 1917....

Snippets and links.....

"""Europe was definitely a follower when it came to phonograph technology. Edison's tin-foil cylinder phonograph thrilled audiences, but failed to inspire imitators or empire builders.
The wax cylinder phonograph was introduced to Europe in 1888, via licensed subsidiaries. High prices kept the machine out of British homes for some time, but in France things were different. Around 1890, Paris bistro owners Charles and Emile Pathe put a Edison machine in their bar to the delight of their patrons. So many people offered to buy the player that in 1894 they began manufacturing "Le Coq," an inexpensive knock-off, and made cylinders as well.

(Aside: "So popular did the 'Cock' become that the swaggering bird was adopted as Pathe's trademark. It can still be seen and heard still at the beginning of Pathe's newsreels." Gelatt, page 102. Note the present tense! Newsreels were not a dead medium in 1955.)

Having famous opera stars convenient to their studios made Pathe's recordings an instant success. Their 1899 catalog featured 1,500 selections. Cylinders were the mode in France until 1908.

The rest of Europe favored the disk. Berliner's brother Joseph helped get a German branch of the gramophone manufacturer under way, and a robust British branch of the firm set up subsidiaries all over the continent.

In London in 1904, William Michaelis introduce the NEOPHONE, a hill-and-dale disc. Gelatt, page 169: "Neophone records were made of a plastic material laminated to a cardboard base; they were exceptionally light, exceptionally cheap(...), and exceptionally scratchy." The Neophone Company offered the "Repro-Neo" adaptor to allow gramophones to play the vertical cut discs. This, and innovations such as a twenty-inch record with a ten minute playing time, didn't keep Neophone from disappearing in 1908.

The Pathe Brothers introduced a vertical cut disc in 1906, eventually favoring it over their popular cylinder line. They sold their own disc players, plus an adaptor similar to the "Repro-Neo." The inexpensive discs sold widely, even in the U.S.A., but did not seriously challenge the lateral-cut discs. Pathe abandoned the hill- and-dale method entirely in 1920.""
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Source(s):

http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/16/167.ht…
& You might like this one
http://www.lotz-verlag.de/Online-Disco-P…



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