Between Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 and World War I, inventors, entrepreneurs, performers, and listeners transformed the singular talking machines of the late 1870s to the ubiquitous music machines of the twentieth century. Through selected images, objects, and links to period sounds, this essay offers a chronological glimpse of interacting social, technical, and entrepreneurial forces at work. Combining visual, aural, and material sources in this way enlarges the historian’s toolbox for understanding the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
