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, ...

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 ...

Today I read a fascinating but extremely harsh editorial in The New York Times, one you most certainly missed. The topic was the potential effects of communications technology on privacy, sociability ...

Phonograph Inventor Thomas Alva Edison has a lot to answer for—as the most casual record-shop browser can testify. Sir Arthur Sullivan once declared: “I am terrified at the thought that so much ...

Five years after Edison invented the phonograph, neither he nor anyone else saw that its most important and lucrative use would be to record and play back music. Those who created the early version of ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...