Our digital era has rendered the old “book on tape” moniker redundant: now we have access to vast archives of the world’s ...

Whether this doll was ever finished with a wig and clothing is unknown. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and when he imagined the uses for his new machine, he speculated that, beyond ...

But first, Edison established the Edison Electric Light Co., assigned 2,500 shares to himself and sold 500 shares to investors including William Vanderbilt. Edison’s team made two major innovations.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph on August 12, 1877. It "will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music," Edison predicted with stunning accuracy in 1878.

Once in operation, Edison’s laboratory began churning out major new inventions at an astonishing pace: Opening in March 1876, it quickly introduced the electric copying machine (1876 ...

11 years earlier, in the year 1877, Thomas Edison and his team had created the phonograph using a thin sheet of tin foil, which in the end turned out not to be the most practical medium for recording ...

In November 1877, Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated the phonograph, a forerunner of today’s music players.

It is quite likely that this all happened later in the year, and the phonograph went through some prototyping, testing, and tinkering before Edison applied for a patent on Dec. 24, 1877.

Arthur Sullivan.” Comic opera composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, pictured c.1860. Picture: Getty The phonograph recordings were unearthed at the Edison Library in New Jersey, US, in the 1950s. Sullivan ...

Thomas Edison had a hand in inventing revolutionary devices such as the movie camera, microphone, and phonograph. But none has been more famous than his improvements to the light bulb, which ...