"If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves."
Thomas Alva Edison
On November 21, 1877, Thomas Alva Edison (1847- 1931) announced the invention of the first device for recording and replaying sound—the "phonograph." Like the development of photography, it was a landmark invention that allowed for moments or periods in time to be captured in perpetuity. This worked by engraving a visual representation of a sound wave on a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder; the sound was captured as a series of indentations in the foil using a cutting stylus that responded to the vibrations of the sound being recorded. When a playback stylus passed over the cylinder a crude representation of the original recording could be heard.
As with so many of his inventions, Edison was spurred on in his efforts by his own hearing difficulties. The inventor's first recorded words were the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Edison considered cutting the indentations into a spiral groove on a flat disk, but he instead chose the outside of a rotating. cylinder as it provided the stylus with a constant speed in the groove. Nevertheless, the principles that governed his invention would later evolve into the mass-produced gramophone record.
While Edison was working in New Jersey, French scientist, Charles Cros, was working on much the same concept. Cros had published his theories in April 1877, but he did not build-such a machine. By the time he submitted his paper to the French Academy of Sciences, however, Edison had already given a practical demonstration of his invention, guaranteeing his place in the history books. The phonograph was the invention which made Edison famous, and he received a patent for it in February 1878, leaving Cros little more than a minor footnote.
