In 1877, Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931) invented the tin foil phonograph – a machine that recorded sound by indenting a sheet of tin foil into a groove in a cylinder. A later wax version was ...

On December 7, 1877 Thomas Edison demonstrated his phonograph at the New York City offices of the nation's leading technical weekly publication, Scientific American. The following report set off ...

Made in June 1878, the recording was created by wrapping leaded tin foil around the cylinder of a first-generation Edison phonograph, turning the crank, and making a sound into the device that ...

Mechanical Music has been around for a very long time, certainly, over three hundred years. People were keen to experiment on the reproduction of ‘sound’ that could be listened to rather than ...

Zoom in: Overseen by digital accessioning archivist Dillon Henry, the collection includes circa 19th-century wax cylinder phonographs created by Thomas Edison. Plus, there's more recent tech like ...

Edison’s phonograph used a needle to etch sound waves onto a rotating cylinder covered with tinfoil, allowing sound to be played back, which was a revolutionary concept in the late 19th century.