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In 1877 Thomas Edison built the phonograph, the first machine that could both record sound and play it back. A needle pressed the vibrations of a voice into a sheet of tinfoil wrapped round a turning cylinder, and running a needle along that groove again brought the sound back.

Menlo Park, New Jersey, 1877

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The story behind the card

Edison hit on the idea while looking for ways to record telegraph and telephone messages at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He announced the invention on 21 November 1877 and was granted a patent in February 1878. Years later he recalled that the first words he recorded were the nursery rhyme 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'. In December 1877 the machine was shown at the offices of Scientific American, where it greeted the editors and asked how they liked the phonograph. Twenty years earlier the Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had built a device that traced sound as wavy lines on soot-blackened paper, but it could not play them back; one of his 1860 tracings was only turned into sound in 2008. Tinfoil wore out quickly, so later machines used wax cylinders and then flat discs.

Türkçe oku
Thomas Edison 1877'de fonografı yaptı: Sesi hem kaydedebilen hem de geri çalabilen ilk makine buydu. Sesle titreşen bir iğne, dönen bir silindire sarılmış kalay folyoyu bastırarak üzerinde bir oluk açıyordu. Oluktan yeniden bir iğne geçirildiğinde ses geri geliyordu.
Menlo Park, New Jersey, 1877

Edison bu fikre, New Jersey'deki Menlo Park laboratuvarında telgraf ve telefon mesajlarını kaydetmenin yollarını ararken ulaştı. Buluşunu 21 Kasım 1877'de duyurdu, patentini Şubat 1878'de aldı. Yıllar sonra, makineye ilk kaydettiği sözlerin “Mary Had a Little Lamb” adlı İngilizce çocuk tekerlemesi olduğunu anlattı. Aralık 1877'de Scientific American dergisinin bürosuna getirilen makine, editörleri selamladı ve fonografı nasıl bulduklarını sordu. Fransız Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville ise yirmi yıl kadar önce, sesi isle kararmış kâğıda dalgalı çizgiler olarak çizen bir aygıt yapmıştı; ama bu çizgiler geri dinlenemiyordu. Onun 1860'ta kaydettiği bir şarkı ancak 2008'de sese dönüştürülebildi. Kalay folyo çabuk aşındığı için sonraki makinelerde önce balmumu silindirler, ardından düz plaklar kullanıldı.

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