The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was established on January 24, 1878, to exploit the new machine by exhibiting it. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night.' Interest was great, and the invention was reported in several New York newspapers, and later in other American newspapers and magazines.

As the December 22, 1877, issue reported, 'Mr. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site.Įdison took his new invention to the offices of Scientific American in New York City and showed it to staff there. There were some differences, however, between the two men's ideas, and Cros's work remained only a theory, since he did not produce a working model of it. The only other recorded evidence of such an invention was in a paper by French scientist Charles Cros, written on April 18, 1877. The patent on the phonograph was issued on February 19, 1878. Also, the diary of one of Edison's aides, Charles Batchelor, seems to confirm that the phonograph was not constructed until December 4, and finished two days later. Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, 'Mary had a little lamb.' To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him.Īlthough it was later stated that the date for this event was on August 12, 1877, some historians believe that it probably happened several months later, since Edison did not file for a patent until December 24, 1877. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kruesi, to build, which Kruesi supposedly did within 30 hours. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it.

The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly.

The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas Edison's work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. Listen to this page History of the Cylinder Phonograph Phonograph Catalog/Advertisement:

Memory master record player