Origins of Video

 

1877 - Edison made the first recording of a human voice ("Mary had a little lamb") on the first tinfoil cylinder phonograph Dec. 6 (the word "Halloo" may have been recorded in July on an early paper model derived from his 1876 telegraph repeater) and filed for an American patent Dec. 24. John Kruesi built this first practical machine Dec. 1-6 from a sketch given to him by Edison that was made Nov. 29 (not on "Aug. 12" that Edison mistakenly wrote on another sketch in 1917). When Kruesi heard Edison's first words Dec. 6, he exclaimed "Gott in Himmel!" (but these words for "God in Heaven" were not recorded and thus have been forgotten). Others before Edison had tried to record sound, but Edison and his tinfoil phonograph were the first to succeed.

1878- Edison was granted patent 200,521 on Feb. 19 for a phonograph using cylinders wrapped with tinfoil with 2-3 min. capacity. None of these early fragile tinfoils have survived, but after Edison experimenters used different recording materials, such as the lead cylinder of Frank Lambert that is known today as the oldest surviving playable cylinder ("One o'clock, Two o'clock"), and the brass discs of Augustus Stroh in England ("mama" and "papa").

1881 - Charles Tainter at the Volta Lab made the first lateral-cut records, but without any practical machine to play them back.

1885 - A second type of phonograph was invented by Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter; they were granted patent 341,214 on a machine that they called the "Graphophone" using wax-coated cylinders incised with vertical-cut grooves; see photos from Smithsonian and the essay Tainter and the Graphophone...

 

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