SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — It's scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world's first recorded blooper. The modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable recording of an ...

But there’s one man – and a very strange invention we would likely never have listened to music without – who we have to thank for it all. The story of sound recording, and reproduction, began 143 ...

The American Indian Wars continued across the nation, and The Washington Post was weeks away from publishing its first paper. The iPod Predecessor Is Born In the 1800s, music patrons could only listen ...

Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park whose genius ushered in a new era of light and sound for humankind, invented the phonograph at his New Jersey laboratory on this day in history, Aug. 12, ...

In the 1870s, Heinrich Beck founded what would eventually become Beck's Brewery. At about the same time, Thomas Edison was hard at work on creating the first phonograph. It's a safe bet neither man ...

If you think of records as platters, you are of a certain age. If you don’t remember records at all, you are even younger. But there was a time when audio records were not flat — they were drums, ...

The digital recorders we use today can trace their history back to the 1870s. There were a number of inventors who built the foundation of audio technology, but one stands out. On this date in 1877 ...

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This media is in the public domain (free of copyright restrictions). You can copy, modify, and distribute this work without contacting the Smithsonian. For more information, visit the Smithsonian's ...

One hundred years ago on a December day in 1877, the world’s first recording session took place in a laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J. It was strictly a one-man show. A 30-year-old scientist, Thomas Alva ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. This is a stock certificate for 50 ...

Thomas Edison wasn't the first person to record sound. A Frenchman named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville actually did it earlier. He invented a device called the phonautograph, and, on April 9, 1860 ...