Come to the library on Saturday November 3rd from 2 to 3:30 pm to see and hear the original method of recording and playing back sound.
After amazing the world with his “speaking phonograph” in 1877, Thomas Alva Edison went on to develop the electric light and over 1000 other patents rightly earning his status as the Wizard of Menlo Park and America’s greatest inventor.
Edison’s tinfoil phonograph was a purely mechanical method of recording and playing back sound that embossed the sound vibrations of speech directly onto foil wrapped around a rotating cylinder. Over the course of 140 years, this simple idea was refined and developed into the recording industry and ultimately led to the music and audio that is endlessly streamed into earbuds around the world.
David Hale’, local teacher, archivist, artist and machinist has just completed a study about the birth of the phonograph that resulted in a 1/2 size working museum model of a tinfoil phonograph. David will demonstrate and discuss this earliest of recording technology on his miniature replica of the kind of demonstration tinfoil phonograph that was first made available for sale to the public in 1878.
Good fun for all ages.