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

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.

To avoid a possible court battle with Joseph Swan, whose British patent had been awarded a year before Edison's, he and Swan formed a joint company called Ediswan to manufacture and market the invention in Britain.

* Edison's patent application for the light bulb at the National Archives.

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.

Mathew Evans is one of two Canadians who developed and patented an incandescent light bulb, on July 24, 1874, five years before Thomas Alva Edison's U. S. patent on the device.

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.

During the initial years of electricity distribution, Edison's direct current was the standard for the United States, and Edison did not want to lose all his patent royalties.

They were interested in early incandescent light bulbs to move Edison's patent of 1880 into question.

He returned to Chicago, opened a small photography studio and began investigating how he might make his own moving pictures without paying a patent fee to Edison's company.

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Western Union acquired both Gray's and Edison's telephone patents to challenge the American Bell Telephony Company ( renamed AT & T in 1899 ), which led to a patent infringement suit and Bell ultimately being named the inventor of the telephone.

Nonviolence was key to Edison's moral views, and when asked to serve as a naval consultant for World War I, he specified he would work only on defensive weapons and later noted, " I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.

* 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.

In 1889, Moltke made two audio recordings with Adelbert Theodor Wangemann, a German native who worked with Thomas Edison and had been sent to Europe with Edison's newly invented cylinder phonograph.

Folklorists and other ethnographers have taken advantage of each succeeding technology, from Thomas Edison's wax-cylinder recording machine ( invented in 1877 ) to the latest CD or digital audio equipment, to record the voices and music of many regional, ethnic, and cultural groups in the United States and around the world.

" Homer's relationship to Thomas Edison's achievements is a version of my own experience of trying to communicate the experience of things you love by driving people crazy ," Greaney said in a DVD audio commentary for the episode.

* 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.

Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin-foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or " engraving ", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus.

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

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.

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

Edison's original idea involved recording pinpoint photographs, 1 / 32 of an inch wide, directly on to a cylinder ( also referred to as a " drum "); the cylinder, made of an opaque material for positive images or of glass for negatives, was coated in collodion to provide a photographic base.

Bell and Tainter also developed wax-coated cardboard cylinders for their record cylinders, instead of Edison's cast iron cylinder which was covered with a removable film of tinfoil ( the actual recording medium ) which was prone to damage during installation or removal.

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.

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.

Since 1902, Edison had also been notifying distributors and exhibitors that if they did not use Edison machines and films exclusively, they would be subject to litigation for supporting filmmaking that infringed Edison's patents.

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

With some later improvements the flat disks of Berliner could be produced in high quantities at much lower costs than the cylinders of Edison's system.

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

Edison's influence can be seen throughout this city of 32, 000.

On May 27, 1901, Edison establishes the Edison Storage Battery Company to develop and manufacture them., " It proved to be Edison's most difficult project, taking ten years to develop a practical alkaline battery.

Tiffin St. Paul's United Methodist Church was the first church in the world to be lit by Edison's light bulb, and the first public building in the United States to be wired for electricity.

But Edison's light bulbs lasted much longer than Swan's, and they could be turned on and off individually, while Swan's bulbs could be used only in a system where several lights were turned on or off at the same time.

In the United States, movie production is known to be dominated by major studios since the early 20th Century ; before that, there was a period in which Edison's Trust monopolized the industry.

The film patents wars of the early 20th century led to the spread of film companies across the U. S. Many worked with equipment for which they did not own the rights, and thus filming in New York could be dangerous ; it was close to Edison's Company headquarters, and to agents the company set out to seize cameras.

* 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.

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.

Thomas Edison's more famous Kinetoscope was exhibited in 1891, but was only able to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole.

He can also be considered a pioneer in the field of photography for using electric lightbulbs in the 1890s, given that lightbulbs were a novelty in the late nineteenth century, with Thomas Edison's reliable incandescent light bulb having been invented only in 1879.

Edison's batteries had a significantly higher energy density than the lead – acid batteries in use at the time, and could be charged in half the time, however they performed poorly at low ambient temperatures and were more expensive.

The set-up was similar to Thomas Edison's " Black Maria " in West Orange, New Jersey, being mounted on circular tracks to be able to get the best possible sunlight.