(if you?re a dork like me)
Thomas Edison was many things. Among them, he was a thief and a liar, and through those two things he ran a successful company where he slandered, crushed, hired or outright stole from his competitors in an effort to have history remember him as the sole inventor for the work of many, many other men. For the most part this was a complete success. For examples of theft and lying, look up
Le Voyage dans la lune which he stole from england and broadcast illegally in america, causing the man who made it go broke (all before interpol or international copyright laws), or the
"war of the currents" where he tried to make people think that
Teslas (a TRUE genius) AC system would kill them just so that they would buy into his DC system and he would get the government contracts over Tesla.
Anyway, all that being said, he was a very smart man and did invent some of the things that he was credited with. Among them was the wax paraffin coil, predecessor to the record. This was the first recording device, which also makes edison the worlds first taper, and bootlegger. He even kept text files of a sort.
This link is to a web page with some of his earliest recordings all on paraffin. Cool
****. My favorite new quote is among them:
" . . . For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening\'s experiment -- astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever."
-Arthur Sullivan 10/5/1888
October 5, 1888
Little Menlo, London, England
The earliest known recording of music anywhere is among them. Paraffin coils had a major drawback - they had to be cranked to record and play back, so if you we not steady, the speed would change. The other problem was they were mostly wax, so each time you played them they wore down a little more until they were all distorted. These get bad at the end with the grinding coming through but overall (given what the are), it sounds very good.
