Edison Invents the Phonograph—Or Is It a Trick?

Edison with an early phonograph, circa 1878.

(Library of Congress)

The Victorians, quite correctly, thought of themselves as living in an age of technological miracles. The steam engine had been adapted to power a myriad of devices—including the railroad, steamships, printing presses, and carpet looms—that greatly speeded up transportation and greatly reduced prices. The two-month trip from England to America had been cut to two weeks by mid-century. What had been luxuries in the eighteenth century—china, flatware, books and newspapers, wallpaper—became the common stuff of middle-class life. In the 1830s light itself had been captured with photography. For the first time in history ordinary people could afford to have their portrait made and their image preserved for posterity. And in November 1877, 130 years ago this month, Thomas Edison invented and drew plans for a way to capture sound. Even by the standards of an age of miracles, it seemed a miracle indeed.

It was a remarkably simple device that did it. Edison, who would need to try hundreds of different materials before he found the one that worked as a filament in the light bulb, was pleased to find that his conception worked on the very first try, although it was not his first conception in his attempt to capture sound.

In early December he had one of his machinists turn his idea into reality. The machinist, a German immigrant named John Kruesi, constructed a grooved cylinder that rotated and moved freely along a shaft when the shaft was cranked. A diaphragm with a stylus attached to its middle could make contact with the groove to record the sound; another stylus-diaphragm pair could be used to play it back. (Edison soon learned that a separate stylus and diaphragm for playback were unnecessary.) Kruesi asked Edison what the thing was for. “I told him I was going to record talking,” Edison remembered later, “and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd.”

Edison wrapped the cylinder in tinfoil and placed the stylus in the groove. Turning the crank, he shouted close to the diaphragm, “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.” Then he placed the stylus of the other diaphragm in the groove and cranked again. Partially deaf since childhood, he heard nothing and thought the experiment had failed. But his assistant and others present heard the machine speak faintly but unmistakably in Edison’s voice.

“Gott im Himmel,” said John Kruesi.

The sound waves from Edison’s voice had caused the recording diaphragm to vibrate, causing the stylus to incise a pattern of hills and valleys in the tinfoil. When replayed, the hills and valleys in the tinfoil cause the other stylus to move up and down, making the playback diaphragm vibrate, reproducing the sounds.

He was stunned when told the machine had worked. “I was never so taken aback in my life,” he said. “. . . I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.” A very market-oriented inventor, he realized, of course, that he was still a long way from a commercial product. For one thing, it took a lot of coordination to get it to work. The cranking had to be done at just the right speed and the voice at just the right volume. If it was too loud, the stylus would tear the foil rather than incise it. And the recording could be played a only few times before it degraded into gibberish.

But he saw the thing’s vast potential immediately, realizing that “music can be crystallized as well” as voice. “I’ve made a good many machines,” he told a reporter, “but this is my baby, and I expect it to grow up and be a big fellow, and support me in my old age.” He was right, and his technological conception would be the basis of a vast industry for more than a hundred years, until replaced by digital recording at the end of the twentieth century.

It would be ten years before the phonograph was successfully commercialized and made available to the general public, but it caused a sensation when Edison publicized it, as he did almost immediately. (He was nearly as good at publicity as he was at inventing.) On December 7, 1877, he went to the offices of Scientific American and demonstrated his new invention to the editor, Alfred Beach. So many people crowded into Beach’s office to see it that Beach feared the floor might collapse. “Here is a little affair of a few pieces of metal,” Beach wrote in the next issue, “set up roughly on an iron stand about a foot square, that talks in such a way, that, even if in its present imperfect form many words are not clearly intelligible, there can be no doubt but that the inflections are those of the human voice.”

Others were more skeptical, and some thought Edison’s device a humbug, powered by ventriloquism. A Methodist bishop came to the laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, to test the machine. He ran off a long string of obscure Biblical names into it, knowing that no one else could reproduce them on one hearing.

After skepticism gave way to amazement, the phonograph caused a nationwide sensation. When Edison demonstrated the machine at the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C., the doors had to be taken off their hinges so that all who wanted to could hear it speak. President Rutherford B. Hayes was so impressed at a late-night demonstration in the White House that he woke his wife up so that she, too, could experience the marvel.

It was the phonograph that created the legend of Thomas Alva Edison. Before it, he was just one more gifted American tinkerer, with a number of useful innovations to his credit. (The phonograph was his 161st patent, out of a lifetime total of more than 1,000.) After the phonograph, he was “the wizard of Menlo Park,” capable of inventing anything.

On April 1, 1878, the New York Daily Graphic ran a banner headline: “Edison Invents a Machine That Will Feed the Human Race—Manufacturing Biscuits, Meat, Vegetables and Wine out of Air, Water, and Common Earth.”

It was, of course, an April Fool’s Day joke. But April Fool’s Day jokes only work if they are plausible.

—John Steele Gordon writes “The Business of America” for American Heritage magazine. His most recent book is An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins).