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About RCA - Talking Machine
"I was always afraid of things that worked the first time," declared an astonished Thomas Edison after hearing his voice reproduced by his own 1877 phonograph. Editors at Scientific American, among the first to hear the inventor's latest creation, were equally startled. "The machine began by politely inquiring as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night."
Edison's inspiration for the recorded sound device came from his brief work as a telegraph operator at the Western Union office in Indianapolis. He discovered during a night shift that he could couple together two old Morse registers to capture incoming dots and dashes for later playback. He could sleep during his shift and catch up on messages later. Conceived as a labor saving device for business, it would take later entrepreneurs to turn the cylinder phonograph into the more practical disk gramophone. In 1901, the Victor Talking Machine Company was established, using the now famous Nipper on its phonographs and records.
Two years after inventing the phonograph, Edison brought the world the incandescent light bulb. Thirteen years later, his start-up electric company would merge with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company and be renamed General Electric. |
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