Seventy‐five years ago, in the autumn of 1877, Thomas Edison cranked out a weak, distorted imitation of his own voice reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb. It was the first time in history that a record of the instantaneous excursions of a source of sound had been used to re‐create the original sound at will. Edison designed the necessary apparatus with great mechanical ingenuity, but his phonograph was only the final model, perhaps already overdue, of a series of acoustical devices which had been built in physics laboratories over a period of almost a century.
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© 1952 American Institute of Physics.
1952
American Institute of Physics
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