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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

The first idea of a genuine talking-machine appears to belong to Thomas A. Edison, who, in 1875, took out patents upon a device intended to reproduce complex sounds, such as those of the human voice.

Edison's phonograph was a sensation. Premiering Jan. 27 on PBS. On December 7, 1877 Thomas Edison demonstrated his phonograph at the New York City offices of the nation’s leading technical weekly ...

To promote its new record label, Beck’s took inspiration from Thomas Edison’s phonograph—a precursor to the record player that used wax cylinders instead of vinyl discs—to create what it’s claiming is ...

Hackaday Prize judge [Ben Krasnow] has been busy lately. He’s put his scanning electron microscope (SEM) to work creating an animation of a phonograph needle playing a record. (YouTube link) This is ...

DECATUR, Ga. — A bill in the legislature is getting some heat from record collectors for describing a phonograph as “anachronistic.” That word describes something as outdated, and record collectors ...