Written by Mason Vander Lugt, Syracuse University catalog librarian and proprietor of  the historical music blog Dinosaur Discs. Many historians are content to describe the invention of the phonograph as a flash of inspiration on a single day in Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratory in July of 1877. While he may have been the ‘wizard of Menlo Park’, Edison was only a man (if an uncommonly gifted and dedicated one). The recording and reproduction of sound had been theorized and predicted for centuries, and scientific breakthroughs in acoustics of the 19th century made it a matter of time. Thomas Young, … Continue reading Phonograph History