November 21, 1877: Thomas Edison invents the phonograph at his laboratory in the Menlo Park section of Raritan Township, Middlesex County, New Jersey. It is the 1st device capable of recording sound.
It recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder. Into its speaker -- partly because it was the only way it could be done, and partly because he was hard of hearing -- Edison shouted into it, an old nursery rhyme:
Mary had a little lamb!
Its fleece was white as snow!
Its fleece was white as snow!
And everywhere that Mary went
the lamb was sure to go!
Although that recording does not survive, Edison recorded it again for a demonstration years later, and that one does survive.
Edison already had many patents to his name, making him wealthy. But the phonograph was the one that first got him national attention. Over the next few years, other scientists, including telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, made improvements that made the recording industry possible.
Edison died in 1931. In 1954, to differentiate itself from the other towns in New Jersey named Raritan, the town that included the neighborhood of Menlo Park changed its name to the Township of Edison. It later erected a monument on the site of Edison's laboratory, a "Light Tower" that referenced his invention of the incandescent lamp, the 1st practical light bulb, in 1879.
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November 21, 1877 was a Wednesday. Traditionally, this is not a day on which football games are played. But one was: On what was then its home field, Hamilton Park in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University beat Trinity College of Hartford, 7-0.
