The digital recorders we use today can trace their history back to the 1870s. There were a number of inventors who built the foundation of audio technology, but one stands out. On this date in 1877 ...

Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park whose genius ushered in a new era of light and sound for humankind, invented the phonograph at his New Jersey laboratory on this day in history, Aug. 12, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Only a handful of the tinfoil recording sheets are known to known to survive, and of those, only two are playable: the Schenectady museum's and an 1880 recording owned by The Henry Ford museum in ...

Ethan Hatcher from Saturday Night On The Circle went on quite the adventure and he tells us all about it! Recently I traveled all the way to the suburbs of Chicago to acquire this somewhat scarce ...

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 ...

A pair of Edison phonographs in MiSci's new exhibit, "Sound Recording." Edison was partial to using wax cylinders for his phonographs. Schenectady’s Museum of Innovation and Science plans to reopen ...