A Shout Out to Thomas Edison
On Thursday, November 29, 1877, Thomas Edison revealed a device that was to fuel all of my adolescent fantasies: the phonograph. It's difficult for me to imagine what life must have been like before recorded music. I recently completed a novel in which the heroine is a violinist, the hero a composer. In the first scene, she desperately tries to memorize the song she's just heard played. Without a way of recording the music, she had little hope of remembering the piece after only one hearing. Yes, there was sheet music, but it's difficult to recreate an entire symphony when you're looking at one instrument's part at a time. Edison's first attempt wasn't all that different from the record players I knew and loved during my youth. There was a spinning cylinder, a groove, and a needle; there were speakers. When I was a child, I watched a man walk on the moon for the first time. At school that autumn, I was one of a dozen children in my class who dreamed of becom...