If you think of records as platters, you are of a certain age. If you don’t remember records at all, you are even younger.

In 1877, Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931) invented the tin foil phonograph – a machine that recorded sound by indenting a sheet of tin foil into a groove in a cylinder. A later wax version was ...

Edison was 30 when he patented his ... from a master disc which was easier to duplicate than a wax cylinder. Berliner’s flat disc records had room for a label identifying the recording by ...