Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science SchenectadyĮdison later switched to wax cylinders. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science SchenectadyĮdison with his wax cylinder machine. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science SchenectadyĪn early phonograph drawing. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science SchenectadyĪ sketch of a woman speaking into a phonograph. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady. Image credit: Museum Innovation and Science SchenectadyĮdison’s first phonograph from 1877. You can listen to them online.Įdison's close associates Sigmund Bergmann (left) and Charles Batchelor pose with Edison (seated) and his tinfoil phonograph 1878. Many of Edison’s recordings have survived and have been digitized as mp3 files. The device made Edison immediately famous and sealed his reputation as the "Inventor of the Age" and led to his nickname "The Wizard of Menlo Park." On April 18, 1878, he even traveled to the White House at the request of President Rutherford B. ”Ĭopies of the original sketches Edison made for his employee John Kruesi. I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb, etc.’ I adjusted the reproducer and the machine reproduced it perfectly. After it was finished the foil was put on.
I told him I was going to record talking and then have the machine talk back. “Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. “I did not have much faith that it would work, expecting I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope for the future of the idea,“ Edison told a biographer. He then asked a worker named John Kruesi to make it from his sketch. He guessed $18 - the equivalent of $390 today. Over this was placed tin foil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm.” He recorded the movements of the diaphragm with a needle.Īs was his habit with new inventions, Edison immediately estimated the price people would pay for the machine. Instead of using a disk, I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. “From my experiments on the telephone I knew the power of a diaphragm to take up sound vibrations. “I was experimenting on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking machine of today,” Edison told a biographer. Images credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.Įdison came up with the device by drawing on his knowledge of the telegraph and the telephone. The frenchman Éduoard Léon-Scott made the phonoautogram, the first recording-only machine in 1857. The 60th Annual Grammy Awards took place on Sunday.Ībove: A drawing from 1878 of Edison speaking into the sound collector of his tinfoil phonogram, the first device that could record and also play back sounds. The Academy eventually decided on Grammy, after the gramophone. In 1958, when the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was thinking about naming their music industry awards, one suggestion was the Eddie to honor Edison’s contribution. The phonograph created a whole new way of experiencing the world through sound. He was just 29 years old and the lightbulb as well as GE, the company he co-founded, was still in his future. But that did not stop him from inventing the phonograph in 1877, a device that for the first time recorded sounds and played them back. “I have not heard a bird sing since I was 12 years old,” he once remarked. Thomas Edison lost much of his hearing when he was still a child.
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