11/06/2018
A brief history of audio transcription.
Before the advent of modern office equipment, the only way in which audio materials could be transcribed was through a collaborative process between the speaker and the individual who recorded their words. This often necessitated frequent repetitions and allowed errors to creep into the finished material due to the time constraints these methods entailed.
Thomas Edison is credited with creating the first modern recording equipment. His breakthrough sound recording device, known as the phonograph, made a crude recording on a tinfoil disk and allowed playback of the recordings. Edison’s phonograph essentially captured and recorded the vibrations created by sound waves onto a soft material. The recording could later be translated, with the use of a highly sensitive stylus, back into sound on a speaker.
However, Edison’s original design was extremely fragile, and it was improved and made more practical by Alexander Graham Bell, who incorporated wax cylinders to create what he dubbed the “graphophone.” This system was still very delicate and, in its initial form, was unsuitable for everyday office use. Later systems used magnetic tape to record audio material and, in the 1990s, modern digital equipment made it possible for audio materials to be recorded almost anywhere to later be transcribed.
