In 1877, Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931) invented the tin foil 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 first sound recording is often credited to Thomas Edison, but in 1857, a typographer named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville actually beat him by inventing the phonautograph, a device ...

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 ...