ON THIS DAY AUGUST 12 2023

This Day in History: August 12

Featured Event

1877




Phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison


On this day in 1877, American inventor Thomas Alva Edison made perhaps his most original discovery, the phonograph, and his early recordings were indentations embossed into a sheet of tinfoil by a vibrating stylus.

phonograph
device





phonograph, also called record player, instrument for reproducing sounds by means of the vibration of a stylus, or needle, following a groove on a rotating disc. A phonograph disc, or record, stores a replica of sound waves as a series of undulations in a sinuous groove inscribed on its rotating surface by the stylus. When the record is played back, another stylus responds to the undulations, and its motions are then reconverted into sound.



Thomas Edison's phonograph of 1877



gramophone
Though experimental mechanisms of this type appeared as early as 1857, the invention of the phonograph is generally credited to the American inventor Thomas Edison (1877). His first recordings were indentations embossed into a sheet of tinfoil by a vibrating stylus; the tinfoil was wrapped around a cylinder that was rotated as the sounds were being recorded. Improvements in Edison’s process followed, notable among which were Emil Berliner’s innovation in 1887 of tracing sound grooves in a spiral on a flat disc rather than in a helix on a cylinder. A negative was made from the flat master disc, and the negative then used as a mold for making many copies that reproduced the original master disc. These “records,” as they came to be known, could be played on a reproducing machine Berliner named a Gramophone.

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Featured Biography

Ian Fleming
British author





Ian Fleming, in full Ian Lancaster Fleming, (born May 28, 1908, London, England—died August 12, 1964, Canterbury, Kent), suspense-fiction novelist whose character James Bond, the stylish, high-living British secret service agent 007, became one of the most successful and widely imitated heroes of 20th-century popular fiction.
The son of a Conservative MP and the grandson of a Scottish banker, Fleming was born into a family of wealth and privilege. He was educated in England, Germany, and Switzerland, and he was a journalist in Moscow (1929–33), a banker and stockbroker (1935–39), a high-ranking officer in British naval intelligence during World War II, and foreign manager of the London Sunday Times (1945–49) before he became a full-time writer. After World War II he spent his winters in Jamaica, where he did much of his writing.

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