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Today it is hard to imagine not being able to listen to Hootie and the Blowfish while we jog. But there was a time when the idea of being able to record a voice or a musician was either inconceivable or considered impossible. Thomas Edison changed that. On December 4, 1877 he became the first person to ever record and play back the human voice.

Although the phonograph was an original invention, it did not rise out of a vacuum It was the son of a marriage between the telephone and the telegraph. These technologies provided both the need for the phonograph and the means by which to produce it.

Edison often pursued inventions to meet a specific need in the marketplace. In the case of the phonograph Edison was motivated by a problem that Western Union had. At that time it was not clear how the new invention of the telephone would be used practically. Western Union wanted to use it to transmit messages which would be written down and delivered to the customer just like a telegram. But the problem was that the telephone could transmit information much more quickly than a telegraph. It was not economical to slow the transmission down to the rate at which someone could transcribe it. What was needed was a way to record the message so it could be played back later at a slower speed. This problem provided the motivation for the invention of the phonograph.

The technology to produce the phonograph was also provided by a combination of the telephone and the telegraph. Early in 1877 Edison and his staff were working with both the telephone and the telegraph. For the telephone Edison was experimenting with how a diaphragm could change a voice into an electrical signal. At the same time he was working on the telegraph repeater. This Edison invention used a stylus (basically a needle) to indent paper with the dots and dashes from a telegraph signal.

It was in this environment that Edison conceived the idea of attaching the stylus from a telegraph repeater to the diaphragm in the mouthpiece of a telephone. Then as he shouted into the diaphragm he ran paper underneath the point of the stylus. As in a telephone the diaphragm vibrated making the stylus indent the paper. He tried this experiment in July of 1877. When he tried to reproduce what he had recorded it did not really work. But it did produce a distinct sound caused by his voice. This was a breakthrough, and from that point on Edison was convinced that he would be able to record the human voice perfectly.

Edison and his staff worked on the problem for the rest of that year until December 3rd when they drew plans for a machine. (See the top of this page for a photograph of this machine.) Tin foil replaced paper as the recording medium. The tin foil was mounted on a cylinder with grooves and a hand crank was attached in order to turn the cylinder during the recording and the playback. The next day one of his employees machined the device according to the plans drawn up. That night with everyone gathered around, Edison turned the crank and said the following words. "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go." His men were astounded when the machine faintly but clearly repeated Edison's words. The public reaction to this invention was also astounding. People were amazed and flocked to demonstrations of the phonograph. Many believed that recording a voice and playing it back later was impossible and that the phonograph was a fraud and a hoax. The invention and surrounding media attention turned Edison into a celebrity. In April of 1876 Edison traveled to Washington to demonstrate the phonograph to the American Academy of Sciences. By the time he was finished he was demonstrating it to the President of the United States - President Hayes.

After that high point Edison did something that few of us when do after just inventing an amazing and potentially lucrative device. He stopped working on it. It was a decade before he took it up again. This was a very Edisonian thing to do. Once he figured out how to make something work he would often get bored with it and move on to something else. Fortunately for us he moved on to inventing the light bulb.

By the time Edison worked his way around to the phonograph again, his patents had lapsed and he had gained a competitor. A man named Tainter, who worked for Alexander Grahmn Bell, had become interested in the phonograph. He made a couple of important technical improvements: using wax as the recording medium and developing a better reproducer. In 1885 Tainter applied for patents. In addition one of Edison's friends and colleagues, Ezra Gilliland, started experimenting with the phonograph. Thomas Edison regained interest in the phonograph in 1887 because of these two spurs to his competitive streak. He added the Tainter improvements to his machine plus an electric motor and speaking trumpet.

In 1887 he formed the Edison Phonograph Corporation to market and sell his creation. The business of selling phonographs was tumultuous at best. Edison was a much better inventor than business man. He quickly became part of a scandal that resulted in 20 years of litigation with Ezra Gilliland. He also tried to push the invention to market must faster than the reliability of the machine warranted. But eventually the situation stabilized, and he went on to make a great deal of money selling both phonographs and recordings.

Other Edison resources on the Web:

Michigan State University has some interesting voice recordings from the turn of the century. In particular check out the Edwin Booth recording done in 1890 on an Edison phonograph.