Thomas Edison is famously known for inventing the light bulb and ushering in a new era of illumination for all of man kind.
But 147 years ago today, Edison invented something that changed the way hear music.
Edison invented the phonograph at his New Jersey laboratory on this day in history, Aug. 12, 1877.
It was the earliest version of the record turntable that became the predominant form of music media in the 20th century — and is still in vogue today.
“The phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music,” Edison predicted, with stunning accuracy, in 1878.
Edison’s phonograph not only played sounds. It recorded them, too.
“Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, ‘Mary had a little lamb,’” states the Library of Congress in its version of his moment of innovation.
“To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him.”
“The phonograph altered how people heard music,” Smithsonian Magazine wrote back in 2016.
It was the beginning of on-demand listening, or “the music you want, whenever you want it,” as one phonograph ad boasted.
The phonograph was created amid Edison’s most inspired period of innovation.
From 1876 to 1879, he invented the telephone transmitter, phonograph and incandescent lamp in rapid succession.
Later versions of the phonograph were called the gramophone.
Its unique horn shape is the inspiration of the name and design of the Grammy Awards, given by the Recording Academy each year since 1959 to honor the best productions and performances in music.