3x3 - Series 3, Episode 3

May 5, 1981

Have you ever found yourself on a desert island with a 78 but no record player? Then take note. Heinz Wolff, principal judge on 'The Great Egg Race', instructs the contestants to make a gramophone from household materials. The guest judge is Terry Pamplin, a musician and musical-instrument maker. One of the earliest devices for playing music was created by American inventor Thomas Alva Edison in 1877. Known as a phonograph, it played back sounds via a stylus or needle following grooves in a cylindrical sheet of foil. In the late 1880s, Emil Berliner invented the gramophone, a modification of its predecessor that used grooves on a flat, rotating disk to play back recorded sounds. The music was reproduced and the sound amplified through the sound box, tone arm and sound horn. Stereo sound was introduced in the 1950s.