PROGRESS RECALLED.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XLVIII, Issue 86, 13 April 1927, Page 1 (Supplement)

PROGRESS RECALLED.

THE FIRST GRAMOPHONE. There was an odd reminder in the papers the other day, carrying one back to the beginning of a very familiar thing. It was a letter from an Englishman who heard the first words uttered by a gramophone. That was in November, 1877, Mr Henry Edmonds, a civil engineer, tells how he went with an American professor to see Mr Edison in his laboratory at Menloe, New Jersey, and found him among his assistants bending over a brass cylinder, which he was turning with a fly-wheel. As he did so the cylinder made this amazing remark: “Mary had a little lamb.” It was the first phonograph repeating for the first time the first w'ords spoken into its receiver.