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The phonograph was the first device for recording and replaying sound. The term phonograph ("sound writer") is derived from the Greek words meaning "sound" or "voice" and transliterated as phone and meaning "writing" and transliterated as graphe. Similar related terms gramophone and graphophone have similar root meanings. The coinage, particularly the use of the -graph root, may have been influenced by the then-existing words phonographic and phonography, which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class," and in 1859 the New York State Teachers' Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings.

Thomas Alva Edison announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877, and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder using an up-down ("hill-and-dale") motion of the stylus. The tinfoil sheet was wrapped around a grooved cylinder, and the sound was recorded as indentations into the foil. Edison's early patents show that he also considered the idea that sound could be recorded as a spiral onto a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct". Edison's patent specified that the audio recording was embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated engraved recordings using wax coated cylinders were patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone. Emile Berliner patented his Gramophone in 1887. The Gramophone involved a system of recording using a lateral (back and forth) movement of the stylus as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc coated with a compound of beeswax in a solution of benzine. The zinc disc was immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched the groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played.

In May 1889, the first "phonograph parlor" opened in San Francisco. Customers would sit at a desk where they could speak through a tube, and order a selection for one nickel. Through a separate tube connected to a cylinder phonograph in the room below, the selection would then be played. By the mid-1890s, most American cities had at least one phonograph parlor.

By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 150 copies of each record.

F. B. Fenby was the original author of the word phonograph. An inventor in Worcester, MA, he was granted a patent in 1863 for an unsuccessful device called the "Electro-Magnetic Phonograph". His concept detailed a system that would record a sequence of keyboard strokes onto paper tape. Although no model or workable device was ever made, it is often seen as a link to the concept of punched paper for player piano rolls (1880s), as well as Herman Hollerith's punch card tabulator (used in the 1890 census), a distant precursor to the modern computer.

Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice it has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the alternative term talking machine was sometimes used.

In American, phonograph was the most common generic term for any early sound reproducing machine, until the second half of the 20th century, when it became archaic and record player became the universal term for disc record machines. In contemporary American usage phonograph most usually refers to disc record machines or turntables, the most common type of analogue recording from the 1910s on.

Gramophone was a U.S. brand name, and as such in the same category as Victrola, Zon-o-phone, Graphophone and Graphonola referring to specific brands of sound reproducing machines. (Similarly, in German, das Grammophon (literally "the Gramophone") was the most common generic term for any sound reproducer using grooved records, hence the brand name Deutsche Grammophon.) Emile Berliner's Gramophone was considered a type of phonograph. The brand name Gramophone was not used in the USA after 1901, and the word fell out of use there, though it has survived in its nickname form, Grammy, as the title of the Grammy Awards.

Vocalion was founded in 1916 by the Aeolian Piano Company of New York City, which also introduced a line of phonographs at the same time. The label first issued single sided vertical cut disc records, soon switching to double sided, then switching to the more common lateral cut system in 1920.

Vocalion pressed their discs in a good quality reddish-brown shellac, which set the product apart from the usual black shellac used by other labels. Advertisements stated "Vocalion Red Records are best", "Red Records last longer". However the shellac was no more durable than good quality black shellac. Vocalion red surfaces are less hardy than contemporary Victor Records. Audio fidelity of Vocalion records are well above average for the era.

In 1925 the label was acquired by Brunswick Records. During the 1920s Vocalion also released "race records" (that is, records recorded by and marketed to African Americans).

In April of 1930, the Warner Bros. bought up Brunswick Records. In December of 1931, the Warner Bros. licensed Brunswick to the American Record Corporation. In 1936 and 1937 Vocalion produced the only recordings of the influential blues artist Robert Johnson.

Vocalion became a subsidiary of Columbia Records in 1938.

The Vocalion label was discontinued in 1940. The Vocalion brand was revived in the late 1950s by Decca Records (U.S.A.) as a budget label for back catalog reissues. Decca Records (U.K.) revived the label for a time in the 1960s.

In 1997 the Vocalion label was revived for a new series of compact discs by Michael Dutton of Dutton Laboratories of Watford, England. The label specialises in reissues of recordings originally made between the 1920s - 1970s, often leasing original master recordings originally made by Decca and EMI.

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