Title: History of sound recording
Content:  In 1857, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, the first device that could record sound waves as they passed through the air. It was intended only for visual study of the recording and could not play back the sound. The recording medium was a sheet of soot-coated paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder carried on a threaded rod. A stylus, attached to a diaphragm through a series of levers, traced a line through the soot, creating a graphic record of the motions of the diaphragm as it was minutely propelled back and forth by the audio-frequency variations in air pressure. In the spring of 1877 another inventor, Charles Cros, suggested that the process could be reversed by using photoengraving to convert the traced line into a groove that would guide the 
Title: Phonograph
Content:  Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound, but were never sonically reproduced until 2008. Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the phonograph in 1877.
Title: Gábor Kornél Tolnai
Content:  The history of sound recording can cover mechanical, acoustical, electrical, magnetic and digital recording. Methods and media for sound recording are varied and have undergone significant changes between the first time sound was actually recorded for later playback until now. Engineers at AEG, working with the chemical giant IG Farben a German chemical industry in Frankfurt am Main, created the world's first practical magnetic tape recorder, the K1, which was first demonstrated in 1935. The three major firms BASF, Bayer and Hoechst produced several hundred different dyes, along with the five smaller firms Agfa, Cassella and some other companies. In 1857 the first device that could record sound waves as they passed through the air was invented. It was the phonautograph. The 
Title: Sound recording and reproduction
Content:  On April 30, 1877, French poet, humorous writer and inventor Charles Cros submitted a sealed envelope containing a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Paris fully explaining his proposed method, called the paleophone. Though no trace of a working paleophone was ever found, Cros is remembered by historians as the earliest inventor of a sound recording and reproduction machine. The first practical sound recording and reproduction device was the mechanical phonograph cylinder, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and patented in 1878. The invention soon spread across the globe and over the next two decades the commercial recording, distribution, and sale of sound recordings became a growing new international industry, with the most popular titles selling millions of units by the early 1900s. The development of mass-production techniques enabled cylinder recordings to become a major new consumer item in industrial countries and the cylinder was the main consumer format from the late 1880s until around 1910.
Title: History of sound recording
Content:   The phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, could both record sound and play it back. The earliest type of phonograph sold recorded on a thin sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a grooved metal cylinder. A stylus connected to a sound-vibrated diaphragm indented the foil into the groove as the cylinder rotated. The stylus vibration was at a right angle to the recording surface, so the depth of the indentation varied with the audio-frequency changes in air pressure that carried the sound. This arrangement is known as vertical or "hill-and-dale" recording. The sound could be played back by tracing the stylus along the recorded groove and 
Title: Voicemail
Content:  The first public records describing voice recording were reported in a New York newspaper and the Scientific American in November 1877. Thomas A. Edison had announced the invention of his "phonograph" saying "the object was to record telephone messages and transmit them again by telephone." Edison applied for a US patent in December 1877 and shortly thereafter demonstrated the machine to publishers, the US Congress and President Rutherford B. Hayes, recording and playing "Mary had a little lamb..." and "there was a little girl who had a little curl... " and other ditties popular at the time. In an article outlining his own ideas of the future usefulness of his machine Edison's list began with "Letter writing, and 
Title: Music technology (electric)
Content:   Between the invention of the phonograph in 1877 and the advent of digital media, arguably the most important milestone in the history of sound recording was the introduction of what was then called electrical recording, in which a microphone was used to convert the sound into an electrical signal that was amplified and used to actuate the recording stylus. This innovation eliminated the "horn sound" resonances characteristic of the acoustical process, produced clearer and more full-bodied recordings by greatly extending the useful range of audio frequencies, and allowed previously unrecordable distant and feeble sounds to be captured. Sound recording began as a purely mechanical process. Except for a few crude telephone-based recording devices with no 
Title: Backmasking
Content:  In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, a device allowing sound to be recorded and reproduced on a rotating cylinder with a stylus (or "needle") attached to a diaphragm mounted at the narrow end of a horn. Emile Berliner invented the familiar lateral-cut disc phonograph record in 1888. In addition to recreating recorded sounds by placing the stylus on the cylinder or disc and rotating it in the same direction as during the recording, one could hear different sounds by rotating the cylinder or disc backwards. In 1878, Edison noted that, when played backwards, "the song is still melodious in many cases, and some 
Title: Volta Laboratory and Bureau
Content:  invented the phonograph in 1877. But the fame bestowed on Edison for this invention (sometimes called his most original) was not due to its quality. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted and squeaky, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of sound recording. However he did not work to improve its quality, likely because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system. Meanwhile, Bell, a 
Title: Sound recording and reproduction
Content:  The next major technical development was the invention of the gramophone record, generally credited to Emile Berliner and patented in 1887, though others had demonstrated similar disk apparatus earlier, most notably Alexander Graham Bell in 1881. Discs were easier to manufacture, transport and store, and they had the additional benefit of being marginally louder than cylinders. Sales of the gramophone record overtook the cylinder ca. 1910, and by the end of World War I the disc had become the dominant commercial recording format. Edison, who was the main producer of cylinders, created the Edison Disc Record in an attempt to regain his market. The 

Question: who was the inventor who developed a way to record sound?
Answer: Thomas Edison.