Bruce Peterson has been on a roll since winning first prize in the eighth-grade science fair in Rowland Heights 30 years ago by demonstrating how Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Peterson’s gig ...

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, ...

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 an 1898 interview, Thomas A. Edison said, “I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph.” On Feb. 19, 1878, ...

“If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, beginning and ceasing at will, we should ...

DECATUR, Ga. — A bill in the legislature is getting some heat from record collectors for describing a phonograph as “anachronistic.” That word describes something as outdated, and record collectors ...

After more than a century, gramophones, phonographs, and cylinder players are prized as collectibles—and music machines. George F. Paul has never forgotten the delight he felt when he encountered his ...

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, ...

In 1941, Walter Myers came across a great bargain at a public sale. For only 50 cents, he purchased a dismantled phonograph, an Edison cylinder machine. “I had never seen a little cylinder machine ...