The Making of America: Thomas Edison
We're surrounded by the fruits of his genius, from electric light to recorded sound, while the example of his "invention factory" at Menlo Park lives on in Silicon Valley. So who was this tireless man, and what are his lessons for us today?
The Incredible Talking Machine
The inventor in 1912 with what he called the Edison Business Phonograph
In the end, they named it the phonograph. But it might have been called the omphlegraph, meaning "voice writer." Or the antiphone (back talker). Or the didaskophone (portable teacher). These are some of the names someone wrote in a logbook in Thomas Edison's laboratory in 1877, after Edison and his assistants invented the first rudimentary machine for recording and playing back sounds. From the first, they thought it would be used to reproduce the human voice, but they had no clear idea of its exact purpose.
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