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

Edison's patented recording method recorded with vertical modulations in a groove.

Edison's success in promoting direct current as less lethal also led to alternating current being used in the electric chair adopted by New York in 1889 as a supposedly humane execution method.

This was similar to the method employed by Edison's machines.

Historian Thomas Hughes ( 1977 ) describes the features of Edison's method.

* Edison's method was to invent systems rather than components of systems.

Edison's method.

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.

Hannibal Williston Goodwin ( April 21, 1822-December 31, 1900 ), was an Episcopal priest at the House of Prayer Episcopal Church and Rectory in Newark, New Jersey, patented a method for making transparent, flexible roll film out of nitrocellulose film base, which was used in Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, an early machine for viewing animation.

Up to 1913, most American film production was still carried out around New York, but because of the monopoly of Thomas Edison's film patents, many filmmakers had moved to Southern California, hoping to escape the litany of lawsuits that the Edison Company had been bringing to protect its monopoly.

By November 1891 William Dickson, at Edison's laboratory, was using Blair's stock for Kinetoscope experiments.

In 1909, tests showed cellulose diacetate to be a viable replacement base, and Kodak began selling acetate-base films the following year in 22 mm widths for Edison's work on the Home Kinetoscope, which was commercially released in 1912.

Exhausted by the lawsuits, Edison's competitors — Essanay, Kalem, Pathé Frères, Selig, and Vitagraph — approached him in 1907 to negotiate a licensing agreement, which Lubin was also invited to join.

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.

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.

Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception.

Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated engraved recordings using wax coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter.

Though Edison's recording technology was better than Berliner's, there were commercial advantages to a disc system since the disc could be easily mass produced by molding and stamping and it required less storage space for a collection of recordings.

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.

Not only were there rival machines with " down-stroke " and " frontstroke " positions that gave a visible printing point, the problem of typebar clashes could be circumvented completely: examples include Thomas Edison's 1872 electric print-wheel device which later became the basis for Teletype machines ; Lucien Stephen Crandall's typewriter ( the second to come onto the American market ) whose type was arranged on a cylindrical sleeve ; the Hammond typewriter of 1887 which used a semi-circular " type-shuttle " of hardened rubber ( later light metal ); and the Blickensderfer typewriter of 1893 which used a type wheel.

In school, the young Edison's mind often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him " addled ".

Edison's family moved to Port Huron, Michigan after the railroad bypassed Milan in 1854 and business declined ; his life there was bittersweet.

Edison's first telegraphy job away from Port Huron was at Stratford Junction, Ontario, on the Grand Trunk Railway.

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

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

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.

On October 8, 1883, the US patent office ruled that Edison's patent was based on the work of William Sawyer and was therefore invalid.

Litigation continued for nearly six years, until October 6, 1889, when a judge ruled that Edison's electric-light improvement claim for " a filament of carbon of high resistance " was valid.

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.

* 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.

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.

Edison's early patents show that he also considered the idea that sound could be recorded as a spiral onto a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more " scientifically correct ".

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.

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

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.

In 1907, French-born, London-based Eugene Lauste — who had worked at Edison's lab between 1886 and 1892 — was awarded the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the transformation of sound into light waves that are photographically recorded direct onto celluloid.

Two days later, Muybridge and Edison met at Edison's laboratory in West Orange ; Muybridge later described how he proposed a collaboration to join his device with the Edison phonograph — a combination system that would play sound and images concurrently.

Meanwhile, plans were advancing at the Black Maria to realize Edison's goal of a motion picture system uniting image with sound.

The first known movie made as a test of the Kinetophone was shot at Edison's New Jersey studio in late 1894 or early 1895 ; now referred to as the Dickson Experimental Sound Film, it is the only surviving movie with live-recorded sound made for the Kinetophone.

Its drawing power as a novelty soon faded and when a fire at Edison's West Orange complex in December 1914 destroyed all of the company's Kinetophone image and sound masters, the system was abandoned.