But there’s one man – and a very strange invention we would likely never have listened to music without – who we have to thank for it all. The story of sound recording, and reproduction, began 143 ...

Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park whose genius ushered in a new era of light and sound for humankind, invented the phonograph at his New Jersey laboratory on this day in history, Aug. 12, ...

Just the other day, I heard one of the earliest popular recorded sambas, Donga’s “Pelo Telefone,” from 1916 and released on an Edison talking record, probably a wax cylinder. A few years later the ...

One hundred years ago on a December day in 1877, the world’s first recording session took place in a laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J. It was strictly a one-man show. A 30-year-old scientist, Thomas Alva ...

In 1878, Thomas Edison’s early writings concerning his then-new invention—the phonograph—focused largely on the capture of spoken language – not so much on music, which the early technology was not ...

Phonographs became popular household items in the early 1900s. A large, clunky wooden box topped by a metal or wooden horn was the most popular shape for the new music-making machines. The phonograph ...

Say what you will about [Thomas Edison], but it’s hard to deny the genius of his self-proclaimed personal favorite invention: the phonograph. Capturing sound as physical patterns on a malleable medium ...

[Jan Derogee] pulled out his phonograph the other day to hear the 100+ year old wax cylinder warble of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, but couldn’t locate the reproducer — this is the small circular ...