Phonograph Invented

In 1877, the American inventor Thomas Edison built the phonograph, the first device able to both record sound and play it back. The machine captured a human voice on a physical medium and reproduced it, something that had seemed almost magical to the public. It marked the beginning of recorded sound, and in time it would transform music, entertainment, communication, and the way people preserved memory.

Edison was already well known as a telegraph engineer and inventor when he turned to the problem, working at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. His thinking grew out of efforts to improve telegraph and telephone technology, including devices that could store messages on paper or other materials. Earlier experimenters had also studied sound. In France, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had created the phonautograph in the late 1850s, which traced sound waves onto soot-covered paper. It could record sound visually, but no one at the time could play those traces back.

Edison's design used a diaphragm connected to a stylus, which pressed vibrations into tinfoil wrapped around a rotating cylinder, turned by a hand crank. Speaking into a horn made the stylus indent the foil; running the stylus over the grooves again made the diaphragm vibrate and reproduce a faint, scratchy version of the original sound. Edison and his assistants are traditionally said to have tested it with a simple nursery rhyme, though the details of that first trial come largely from later accounts. The invention was publicly demonstrated late in 1877 and drew widespread press attention, earning Edison the nickname "the Wizard of Menlo Park."

The first phonograph was more a marvel than a practical product. Tinfoil recordings wore out quickly and could be played only a few times. Edison suggested many uses, including dictation, talking books, and preserving the voices of the dead, with music as just one possibility. He then turned his attention to the electric light, and the phonograph languished for a decade.

Development resumed in the 1880s. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory produced improved versions using wax-coated cylinders, and Emile Berliner introduced the flat disc record and the gramophone, which proved easier to mass-produce. Edison returned to the phonograph as well, and a long commercial rivalry followed between cylinders and discs. By the early twentieth century, discs had largely won out.

The legacy of the phonograph is vast. It created the recording industry, allowed performances to reach audiences far from where they happened, and gave historians and linguists a lasting archive of speech and song. Later technologies, from magnetic tape to digital streaming, descend from the basic idea that sound could be stored and replayed.