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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 a ...

Phonographs were invented in 1877. The early ones had one needle for recording and another needle for playing. The music was recorded on tinfoil-coated cylinders using a needle to make tiny lines that ...

Imagine if your couch or your coffee maker suddenly started talking to you — or perhaps launched into the chorus of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain.” What would your reaction be? Consider that, ...

Mark Twain wanted to bring a phonograph to Quarry Farm in Elmira during summer 1888 Twain suffered from rheumatism in his shoulder and right hand and found it difficult to write longhand Twain would ...