Edison's Phonograph (1877): The First Machine to Play Back Sound

Edison’s phonograph, built at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in late 1877, was the first machine that could record sound and play it back. When Thomas Edison recited “Mary had a little lamb” into its mouthpiece and heard his own voice return from a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil, recorded sound was born. The invention made Edison internationally famous and laid the foundation for the music and recording industries of the twentieth century.

Background: telegraphs, telephones and an idea

By 1877 Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) ran a private research laboratory at Menlo Park, a small village in New Jersey, where a team of machinists and assistants turned out inventions for telegraph and telephone companies. He was working on two problems that pointed towards recording. One was a telegraph repeater that embossed Morse signals on a paper disc so that messages could be played back later at speed. The other was a carbon transmitter for the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell had patented in 1876.

Edison’s notebooks from July 1877 record the thought that the vibrations of a telephone diaphragm might be indented into a moving strip of paper and later reproduced. Over the following months he and his assistants, among them Charles Batchelor, experimented with paraffin-coated paper. By the autumn Edison had settled on a simpler design using a metal cylinder and a sheet of tinfoil.

He was not alone in thinking about sound. In France the phonautograph of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, patented in 1857, had already traced sound waves as wavy lines on soot-blackened paper, but it was designed to make sound visible, not to play it back. In April 1877 the French poet Charles Cros deposited a sealed description of a playback machine with the Academy of Sciences in Paris, but he had not built one.

Building the first phonograph

According to the standard account, Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his Swiss-born chief machinist, John Kruesi, in late November 1877. Kruesi built it in about a day or two, reportedly unsure what it was for. The device was strikingly simple: a brass cylinder with a spiral groove cut into its surface, mounted on a long threaded shaft and turned by a hand crank.

A sheet of tinfoil was wrapped around the cylinder. On one side sat a mouthpiece with a thin diaphragm, to which a blunt steel stylus was attached. When someone spoke loudly into the mouthpiece, the diaphragm vibrated and the stylus pressed a track of tiny hills and valleys into the foil over the groove. To play the recording, the cylinder was wound back and a second, more delicate diaphragm and needle traced the track, turning the indentations back into vibrations and sound.

Edison later said he shouted the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb” into the machine and was startled when it worked at the first attempt. That story comes from his own later recollections, but it has become the accepted account of the first recording, usually dated to early December 1877.

Demonstration and patent

On 7 December 1877 Edison and his assistants carried the phonograph to the New York offices of Scientific American. The machine greeted the editors, asked after their health and bid them good night, and the magazine described it in its issue of 22 December. Crowds soon gathered to hear the talking machine, and newspapers began calling Edison “the Wizard of Menlo Park”.

Edison filed his patent application on 24 December 1877. US Patent No. 200,521 for an improvement in phonograph or speaking machines was granted on 19 February 1878, remarkably quickly, because the Patent Office found no earlier American machine of the kind. In April 1878 Edison demonstrated the phonograph at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington and to President Rutherford B. Hayes at the White House.

Investors formed the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company in 1878 to manufacture exhibition machines. Showmen toured them around the United States and Europe, charging audiences to hear speech, songs and cornet solos recorded and played back on stage.

Limits of the tinfoil machine

The tinfoil phonograph was a sensation, but it was not a practical product. Recordings were faint and distorted, and they lasted only a minute or two. The foil could not be removed and replayed later without damage, and each playback flattened the indentations a little more. Turning the crank at a steady speed was difficult, so pitch wandered.

In June 1878 Edison published an article in the North American Review listing ten future uses, including dictation, books for blind people, teaching elocution, music, family records of voices, talking clocks and toys, and recording telephone calls. Most of these eventually came true, but not with tinfoil. Later in 1878 Edison turned his attention to electric lighting, and the phonograph was set aside for almost a decade.

Rivals and the improved phonograph

Others took up the idea. At the Volta Laboratory in Washington, Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter, working with Alexander Graham Bell, replaced tinfoil with wax-coated cylinders in which the stylus cut a groove rather than pressing it. Their graphophone was patented in 1886. In 1887 the German-American inventor Emile Berliner patented the gramophone, which recorded on flat discs that could be mass-produced from a master.

Spurred by the competition, Edison returned to the phonograph in 1887 and introduced an improved model with solid wax cylinders and an electric motor in 1888. Phonographs were first marketed as office dictating machines, but the public preferred entertainment. Coin-operated phonographs in arcades and, later, home machines playing music cylinders and records created a mass market by the 1890s. Discs eventually won out, and Edison’s company stopped making cylinders in 1929.

Legacy

The phonograph changed how people experienced sound. For the first time, a voice or a performance could be preserved after the speaker or musician had gone, copied and heard in distant places. Recorded music transformed popular culture, allowed folk songs and endangered languages to be documented and created whole industries. Edison’s link between sound and machinery also fed into his later work on moving pictures, an idea taken further by others such as the Lumière brothers.

The original “Mary had a little lamb” foil has not survived, and very few tinfoil recordings exist at all. In 1927, for the fiftieth anniversary, Edison recorded the rhyme again, and that later recording is often played as a stand-in for the lost original.

Myths and facts

A common claim is that Edison made the first sound recording. In fact Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph traces from around 1860 are older; researchers converted some of them into audible sound in 2008. What Edison achieved first was a machine that could both record and reproduce sound, which is the real meaning of his invention.

Another myth holds that Edison simply copied Charles Cros. Cros’s sealed description was only opened and read in December 1877, after Edison’s machine existed, and there is no evidence that Edison knew of it.

Timeline

• 1857: Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patents the phonautograph, which records sound waves but cannot play them back.
• 1877, 30 April: Charles Cros deposits a sealed description of a sound-reproducing machine in Paris.
• 1877, July: Edison notes the idea of recording telephone vibrations and playing them back.
• 1877, late November to early December: John Kruesi builds the tinfoil phonograph; Edison records “Mary had a little lamb”.
• 1877, 7 December: Edison demonstrates the phonograph at the offices of Scientific American in New York.
• 1877, 24 December: Edison files his patent application.
• 1878, 19 February: US Patent No. 200,521 is granted.
• 1878, April: Edison demonstrates the phonograph in Washington, including at the White House.
• 1888: Edison’s improved wax-cylinder phonograph goes on sale.

Why it matters

The tinfoil phonograph was crude and short-lived, but it proved that sound could be captured and brought back. Every later recording technology, from wax cylinders and vinyl records to magnetic tape and digital audio, follows from the principle Edison demonstrated at Menlo Park in 1877.