That changed in 1877 when Thomas Edison unveiled his phonograph. It wasn’t the first such device to record and play back audio, but it was the first generally reliable one: scratchy and nearly ...

But there was a time when audio records were not flat — they were drums, which was how the original Edison phonograph worked ... You could record and playback audio on tin foil wrapped around ...

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 ...

In 1877, Thomas Alva Edison ... phonograph – a machine that recorded sound by indenting a sheet of tin foil into a groove in a cylinder. A later wax version was the version on which the ...