The music we here from our CD players, the turmoil of emotions we feel from the music and sounds within a movie is all possible because of the phonograph. Invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, it was originally invented to make the telephone more popular and easier than the telegraph, but as time went on it has led to many other inventions we take for granted today. Edison came up with the idea of this magnificent machine in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Although Charles Cros did publish a similar machine in April, 1877, Edison is still credited for this invention. Edison had the idea to create a machine that would record the message and then be able to play it back. Originally phone messages had to be listened to, written down by hand, and given to the person it was meant for. …show more content…
The machine he originally thought of had a microphone that would record when a handle on the other side was cranked. Then, a needle would make grooves in the tin foil wrapped cylinder by shaking to the vibrations of a voice. When the recording was done another needle would follow the grooves imitating the sound that was previously recorded. This sound would be emulated through the horn on the top of the machine. However, a problem was later presented with this model or at least the cylinders that hold the recording. The first cylinder was made of tin foil, but the material needed to change due to the fact that they were easily damaged. Next they used wax cylinders, but they could only hold a maximum of two minutes of recording. Also they didn’t last very long either. So Edison created a gold cylinder to make an original recording, and then that cylinder could be used to make replica recordings. Later the cylinders started becoming flat discs called records. These lasted longer and could hold longer