My entry for the Inventor challenge

This week’s Gothic Arches challenge was “Inventors.” I chose T.A. Edison. I think he was one of the best inventors on History.

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I used my new Gothic Ornament

Thomas Edison’s work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone as a result of this the phonograph was invented. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly. This development led Edison to wonder if a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against quickly-moving paraffin (wax) paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. Edison later on changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kreusi, to build, which Kreusi supposedly did within 30 hours. Edison instantly tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, “Mary had a little lamb.” To his wonder, the machine played his words back to him.