Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park whose genius ushered in a new era of light and sound for humankind, invented the phonograph at his New Jersey laboratory on this day in history ...

But there was a time when audio records were not flat — they were drums, which was how the original Edison phonograph worked. [Our Own Devices] did a video earlier showing one of these devices ...

It is believed that this event was the first time that any public audience had heard those sounds since they were captured by a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878. For years ...