There's more reading and instruction to be heard on discs than ever before, although the spoken rather than the sung word is as old as Thomas Alva Edison's first experiment in recorded sound.

* 1888 – An audio recording of English composer Arthur Sullivan's " The Lost Chord ", one of the first recordings of music ever made, is played during a press conference introducing Thomas Edison's phonograph in London, England.

The first commercial exhibition of film took place on April 14, 1894 at Edison's Kinetoscope peep-show parlor.

* 1904 – Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany becomes the first person to make a sound recording of a political document, using Thomas Edison's phonograph cylinder.

* 1891 – History of cinema: The first public display of Thomas Edison's prototype kinetoscope.

The word " mimeograph " was first used by Albert Blake Dick when he licensed Edison's patents in 1887.

While other inventors had produced devices that could record sounds, Edison's phonograph was the first to be able to reproduce the recorded sound.

Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to produce a device that could both record and reproduce sound.

The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent, and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording.

* 1882 – Thomas Edison's first commercial hydroelectric power plant ( later known as Appleton Edison Light Company ) begins operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States.

Edison's major innovation was the first industrial research lab, which was built in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

The quadruplex telegraph was Edison's first big financial success, and Menlo Park became the first institution set up with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation and improvement.

Thomas Edison's first successful light bulb model, used in public demonstration at Menlo Park, December 1879

Mahen Theatre in Brno ( in what is now the Czech Republic ) was the first public building in the world to use Edison's electric lamps, with the installation supervised by Edison's assistant in the invention of the lamp, Francis Jehl.

In 1883, the City Hotel in Sunbury, Pennsylvania was the first building to be lit with Edison's three-wire system.

* March 3 – Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany becomes the first person to make a political recording of a document, using Thomas Edison's cylinder.

* May 9 – Edison's 1½ inch system of Kinetoscope is first demonstrated in public at the Brooklyn Institute.

* November 21 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record sound, considered Edison's first great invention.

* May 20 – Thomas Alva Edison's prototype kinetoscope is first displayed at Edison's Laboratory, for a convention of the National Federation of Women's Clubs.

It was Edison's format, however, that became first the dominant standard and then the " official " standard of the newly formed Motion Picture Patents Company, a trust established by Edison, which agreed in 1909 to what would become the standard: 35 mm gauge, with Edison perforations and a 1. 3 aspect ratio.

Muybridge later claimed that on this occasion, six years before the first commercial motion picture exhibition, he proposed a scheme for sound cinema that would combine his image-casting zoopraxiscope with Edison's recorded-sound technology.

The efforts of the two did much to further electrical engineering — Tesla's work on induction motors and polyphase systems influenced the field for years to come, while Edison's work on telegraphy and his development of the stock ticker proved lucrative for his company, which ultimately became General Electric.

Some of Edison's earliest inventions were related to telegraphy, including a stock ticker.

The key to Edison's fortunes was telegraphy.

The electric pen was developed as an offshoot of Edison's telegraphy research.

Bell adopted carbon transmitters similar to Edison's transmitters and adapted telephone exchanges and switching plug boards developed for telegraphy.

When he learned of a job with Edison in the US, Insull indicated he would be glad to have it, provided it was as Thomas Edison's personal secretary.

In an attempt to follow in Edison's footsteps, Homer quits his job at the power plant to become an inventor.

Many independent filmmakers, who controlled from one-quarter to one-third of the domestic marketplace, responded to the creation of the MPPC by moving their operations to Hollywood, whose distance from Edison's home base of New Jersey made it more difficult for the MPPC to enforce its patents.

Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil.

Berliner successfully argued that his technology was different enough from Edison's that he did not need to pay royalties on it, which reduced his business expenses.

It was built with the funds from the sale of Edison's quadruplex telegraph.

The idea of using this particular raw material originated from Edison's recalling his examination of a few threads from a bamboo fishing pole while relaxing on the shore of Battle Lake in the present-day state of Wyoming, where he and other members of a scientific team had traveled so that they could clearly observe a total eclipse of the sun on July 29, 1878, from the Continental Divide.

The day after Edison died, the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla who was quoted as saying:

They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve ( by use of the Sprengel pump ) and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.

The carbon burner, a " most important feature of a practical lamp " differs widely from Edison's filament.

The band completed their lineup by adding bassist and progressive rock veteran Pete Trewavas from the group Marillion and Edison's Children.

Reflecting the number of Edison's residents from India and China, the township has sister city arrangements with Shijiazhuang, China, and Vadodara, India.

At its peak Edison's operation employed 500 people, but after a 10 year effort he abandoned his attempt to compete with more economical ores from Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range.

The machines were purchased from the new Kinetoscope Company, which had contracted with Edison for their production ; the firm, headed by Norman C. Raff and Frank R. Gammon, included among its investors Andrew M. Holland, one of the entrepreneurial siblings, and Edison's former business chief, Alfred O. Tate.

Vitagraph was not the only company seeking to make money from Edison's motion picture inventions, and Edison's lawyers were very busy in the 1890s and 1900s filing patents and suing competitors for patent infringement.

Because of this, a number of filmmakers responded by building their own cameras and moving their operations to Hollywood, California, where the distance from Edison's home base of New Jersey made it more difficult for the MPPC to enforce its patents.

The Naval Research Laboratory came into existence from an idea that originated from Thomas Edison's published statement in May 1915, " The Government should maintain a great research laboratory ...

Edison's assistant Clarence Madison Dally ( 1865 – 1904 ) died as a result of exposure to radiation from fluoroscopes, and in 1903, Edison abandoned his work on fluoroscopes, saying " Don't talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them .".

* 1879: Francis Blake invents a carbon transmitter similar to Edison's that saves the Bell company from extinction.

* Garrett P. Serviss ' Edison's Conquest of Mars ( 1898 ) repeatedly mentions Schiaparellian canals ( which play a key part in the denouement of the story ), but does not describe them in detail, apparently considering them simply irrigation canals comparable to those on Earth — ignoring the fact that, in that case, they could hardly be visible from Earth.

Before he was able to put his ideas into practice, the announcement of Thomas Edison's phonograph, which recorded sound waves by indenting them into a sheet of tinfoil from which they could be played back immediately, temporarily relegated Cros's less direct method to obscurity.