ABSTRACT
Eminent American inventor, born in Milan, Ohio. Edison is usually credited with the invention of the cylinder phonograph. His earliest patent application for the device was dated 24 Dec 1877. In July of that year Edison had, through serendipity, discovered that paper tape he was using for telegraph relay experiments could retain and play back sound signals. He applied the concept in a sketch for a tinfoil phonograph on 29 Nov 1877, and conveyed the idea to his assistants Charles Batchelor and John Kruesi. Those
men produced a prototype machine and gave it to Edison on 6 Dec 1877; that phonograph was covered by U.S. patent #200,251, granted on 10 Feb 1878. (The wooden model submitted to the Patent Office went to the Science Museum, London, thence to the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, Michigan.)
Although he remained interested in the phonograph, Edison did little work on it for 10 years-during that decade he concentrated on the electric light and the electric power industry. In 1887 he resumed experimentation with recorded sound, and developed the New Phonograph, in which solid wax cylinders replaced the tinfoil of the original invention. He followed this with the Improved Phonograph, and then on 16 June 1888 with the Perfected Phonograph (exhibited at the Crystal Palace, London, in August 1888). A long series of ever-improved models emerged from the Edison workshops over the next three decades.
