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.

Chemical developments originating from the West Orange laboratory included plastics and waxes for disc and cylinder phonograph records, nickel-iron alkaline electric storage batteries, and ...

That changed in 1877 when Thomas Edison unveiled his phonograph. It wasn’t the first such device to record and play back audio, but it was the first generally reliable one: scratchy and nearly ...

In 1877, Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931) invented the tin foil phonograph – a machine that recorded sound by indenting a sheet of tin foil into a groove in a cylinder. A later wax version was ...

In a way, of course, all this goes back to Thomas Edison’s invention ... Edison was 30 when he patented his phonograph in 1877, but he wasn’t the first to record sound. That happened 20 ...