Edison's Phonograph Captures the First Recorded Voice
In 1877 Thomas Edison built a hand-cranked machine that could capture a human voice on tinfoil and play it straight back.
While tinkering with the telephone in 1877, Thomas Edison had a startling idea at his Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey: if a voice could vibrate a needle, that needle could scratch a permanent record of the sound onto a soft surface, and the same groove could later be traced back to recreate it.
His machinist John Kruesi built the device. A sheet of tinfoil was wrapped around a grooved metal cylinder; shouting into a mouthpiece pushed a needle that embossed the foil as the operator turned a crank. A second needle and diaphragm then replayed the marks as sound.
“I never was so taken back in my life.” — Edison, on hearing the machine repeat his words
On December 6, 1877, Edison recorded a verse of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and the machine reproduced it almost perfectly. It was the first instrument able to both record and play back the human voice, and it launched the recording and record industries worldwide.
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