Edison came up with the idea in the second half of 1877 (the precise date remains uncertain, though he filed for the patent in December). He tested his cylinder phonograph with the old nursery rhyme, “Mary had a little lamb.”
“Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best,” Edison later claimed. But, at the time of his patent, he only conceived of music recording as a secondary use for his new machine. He expected the primary market would involve “Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.” But the hearing-impaired inventor was not so stubborn that he wouldn’t oblige his public.
Edison’s invention took the democratization of music to another level. From now on, people need not be satisfied with sheet music, but could listen to the best of modern music—Caruso, Tchaikovsky, etc.—in their own homes.
Robert V. Bruce’s entry on “The Wizard of Menlo Park:” in The Reader’s Companion to American History (edited by Eric Foner and John A. Garraty) points out that Edison was “clumsier in entrepreneurship than in invention, distracted by the demands of management, [with] his inventive genius ebbing with age.” What could he mean?
I got a pretty good idea of what Bruce was talking about when I visited the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, N.J. The ugly red-brick buildings were where Edison and his group of “muckers” labored long hours to come up with more than half of his 1,000 inventions.
One anecdote illustrates Edison’s unique brand of management style as he aged. In the morning, annoyed with an associate, he told him he was fired and should be off the premises by noon. By the end of the day, struggling with a knotty technical problem, he asked where the employee was. “You fired him this morning,” he was told. “Well, get him back,” the great man answered.
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