First phonograph
Who
Tinfoil Phongraph
What
first
Where
United States ()
When
1877
The first phonograph, also known as the “Tinfoil Phongraph,” was invented by Thomas Alva Edison in 1877 in the state of New Jersey in the United States. It was originally designed to record and play back messages from another new communications device—the telephone. To record sound, Edison used some tin foil which was wrapped around a cylinder. The first recording, if not quite a “hit” record, was famously the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”