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 ...

In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the first device to ever record and play back sound. Speaking into a mouthpiece caused a metal stylus attached to a diaphragm to move up and down. The stylus made ...

If you think of records as platters, you are of a certain age. If you don’t remember records at all, you are even younger. But there was a time when audio records were not flat — they were drums, ...

The discoverer of the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the quadruplex telegraph, among other things, is one of ...

Phonograph: Edison's great achievements often involved perfecting other people's ideas, but his phonograph, a machine to record sounds, was completely new. His first phonograph used a tinfoil-covered ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. Photograph of Thomas Alva Edison's ...

Independence fire service leaders warn they could lose more than 10 percent of their firefighters because they cannot afford to live on their current wages. January 29, 1861. Kansas becomes the 34th ...

Thomas Edison is often credited with recording the first human sound. In reality, that achievement belongs to a French inventor named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His device captured sound ...

You might be old enough to remember record platters, but you probably aren’t old enough to remember when records were cylinders. The Edison Blue Amberol records came out in 1912 and were far superior ...