ABSTRACT
The record industry owes its origins to the experiments of several French scientists. In the nineteenth century, the French inventor Charles Cros designed, but did not actually build, a device that could record sound. It wasn’t until 1877 that the American inventor Thomas Edison developed an early version of the phonograph. Edison’s original vision of the machine anticipated that it would be used as a sort of Dictaphone or recording machine. Edison’s machines recorded on wax cylinders, resembling solid mailing tubes. Soon, prerecorded cylinders were being manufactured to be played back on Edison’s phonographs.
