Movies Lights, Camera ... Edison!
Though Edison didn't invent the Vitascope, his company manufactured and marketed it
Toward the end of MGM's 1940 biopic Edison, the Man, starring Spencer Tracy, an honor roll of Thomas Edison's achievements marches onto the screen: Fluoroscope! Mimeograph! Storage battery! And then to the heart of the matter for the film industry: Motion pictures! Projection machine! Talking pictures! In its golden age, Hollywood was paying tribute to the man who, nearly a half-century earlier, possessed the genius and foresight to invent the movies.
The Incredible Talking Machine
In the end, they named it the phonograph. But it might have been called the omphlegraph, meaning “voice writer." Or the antiphone (back talker). Or the didaskophone (portable teacher). These are some of the names someone wrote in a logbook in Thomas Edison's laboratory in 1877, after Edison and his assistants invented the first rudimentary machine for recording and playing back sounds. From the first, they thought it would be used to reproduce the human voice, but they had no clear idea of its exact purpose.
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