First Recording

December 6, 1877 - It was on this day that Thomas Edison recorded his own voice using his ground-breaking invention, the phonograph. This was the first successful recording of a human voice that was then able to be played back.

Edison had been working on a way to transcribe telegraph messages onto paper. He figured that a similar method might be used to record telephone messages. The vibrations of the human voice would make patterns on a surface similar to the telegraph signals. Once he conceived of the phonograph in his head, it took only 30 hours to build a prototype. Edison stepped up to the machine and blurted out the first thing that popped into his head, the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

The orginal recording was lost, but Edison re-recorded the poem in 1927.