Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, 'Mary had a little lamb.' To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him.Īlthough it was later stated that the date for this event was on August 12, 1877, some historians believe that it probably happened several months later, since Edison did not file for a patent until December 24, 1877. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kruesi, to build, which Kruesi supposedly did within 30 hours. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion.

In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly.

The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas Edison's work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. Listen to this page History of the Cylinder Phonograph Phonograph Catalog/Advertisement:

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