August 12
Phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison
1877: On this day American inventor Thomas Alva Edison made perhaps his most original discovery, the phonograph. Because the telephone was considered a variation of acoustic telegraphy, Edison during the summer of 1877 was attempting to devise for it, as he had for the automatic telegraph, a machine that would transcribe signals as they were received, in this instance in the form of the human voice, so that they could then be delivered as telegraph messages. Edison employed a stylus-tipped carbon transmitter to make impressions on a strip of paraffined paper. To his astonishment, the scarcely visible indentations generated a vague reproduction of sound when the paper was pulled back beneath the stylus. He unveiled the tinfoil phonograph, which replaced the strip of paper with a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil, in December 1877.
1955: German novelist and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann died near Zürich, Switzerland.
1944: Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.—U.S. naval pilot, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, and brother of President John F. Kennedy—died in a plane crash while flying on a secret mission during World War II.
1898: The Republic of Hawaii was annexed as part of the United States.
1851: Isaac Merrit Singer patented his sewing machine and formed I.M. Singer & Company to market the product.
1676: King Philip, intertribal chief of the Wampanoag Indians, was killed, ending the conflict between Indians and English settlers known as King Philip's War. |
