Imagine if your couch or your coffee maker suddenly started talking to you — or perhaps launched into the chorus of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain.” What would your reaction be? Consider that, ...

Just the other day, I heard one of the earliest popular recorded sambas, Donga’s “Pelo Telefone,” from 1916 and released on an Edison talking record, probably a wax cylinder. A few years later the ...

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 ...

In 1878, Thomas Edison’s early writings concerning his then-new invention—the phonograph—focused largely on the capture of spoken language – not so much on music, which the early technology was not ...

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Milan’s most famous son and the world’s greatest inventor will receive his second Grammy. Thomas Alva Edison will receive a Special Merit Award from The Recording Academy this ...

WEST ORANGE — Sheltered from the summer sun by the red and white tarp of a carnival tent, Jerry Fabris set his ancient machines spinning. Musicians jostled for position around him, pointing horns at a ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...