The first sound recording, and the first of the human voice, that could be heard by contemporaries, was made by Thomas Edison (1847–1931). Although the chronology has frequently been presented in somewhat garbled form (often by Edison himself), the circumstances seem to have been established definitively in Randall Stross's 2007 biography of the inventor. Working late in the lab on 18 July 1877, comparing telephone diaphragms, Edison felt the vibrations as he spoke into one, and voiced his suggestion that, with a point on the diaphragm, it should be possible to make a recording while pulling something beneath it. With the assistance of John Kruesi and Charles Batchelor the experiment was rigged up there and then. Batchelor pulled a strip of wax paper through the device, while Edison spoke the standard phrase the lab used to test telephone diaphragms: "Mary had a little lamb." Playback was indistinct but audible, and by breakfast time the following morning they had achieved clear articulation from the waxed paper. The lab notebook for 18 July includes the brief entry:
Just tried experiment with a diaphragm having an embossing point & held against parafin paper moving rapidly the spkg vibrations are indented nicely & theres no doubt that I shall be able to store up & reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly
The entry written by Edison is also signed by Batchelor and James Adams, another assistant. It seems clear that Edison himself didn't immediately see the significance of what he had achieved, and it wasn't till 5 November 1877 that he set down on paper his conceptualisation of the tinfoil cylinder phonograph. The first actual working model was built by John Kruesi on 4 December 1877; the sentence "How do you get that?" is said to have been recorded and reproduced by that date.
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