When did Edison invent the phonograph?

When did Edison invent the phonograph?

Don’t you love to listen to your favorite songs on a CD? But if you ask your grandmother she will tell you that when she was a little girl, there were no CDs or audio cassettes. When she wanted to enjoy some music, she would listen to a record on their gramophone. In fact, the phonograph or gramophone was the most common device for playing recorded sound from the 1870s and 1980s.

Thomas Alva Edison, a well known inventor announced the invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1878. The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas Edison’s work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. Edison’s early phonographs used a revolving cylinder wrapped in tinfoil sheet, which had to be turned by hand.

Sound waves recorded as grooves in the cylinder using an up-and-down motion of the stylus, a type of needle. Mechanical vibrations were created when the operator spoke into a recording tube. These vibrations were transferred as impressions on the tinfoil. When another needle moved along the impressions or grooves, the vibrations that were caused reproduced the voice in the hearing tube.