I told [John Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc.
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Describing the initial, seemingly absurd, demonstration of the phonograph.
Date: 1877-1878 (approximate)
Self-DeprecatingFound in 1 providers: gemini
1 source checked
Edison describes the moment he invented the phonograph. He told his machinist John Kruesi he wanted to build a device that could record a human voice and play it back. Kruesi dismissed the idea as ridiculous, but Edison built it anyway. Once assembled, he wrapped tinfoil around the cylinder, spoke the nursery rhyme 'Mary had a little lamb' into it, and the machine played his own voice back at him.
This captures Edison at his core: a relentless tinkerer who pursued ideas his own staff called absurd. Working from his Menlo Park lab in 1877, he led a team that treated 'impossible' as a starting point. The phonograph earned him the nickname 'The Wizard of Menlo Park' and was the invention he personally cherished most, alongside his 1,093 patents covering the light bulb, motion pictures, and electrical distribution systems.
In 1877, capturing sound seemed like magic. The telegraph and telephone (Bell, 1876) had just proven electricity could carry messages, but no one had preserved a human voice. America was mid-Second Industrial Revolution, and inventors were racing to commercialize electricity. Edison's tinfoil phonograph stunned audiences, with newspapers calling it supernatural. It launched the recorded-music industry and cemented public belief that American ingenuity could bend physical reality itself.
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