Menlo Park: The World's First R&D Lab

The Phonograph
Among the many significant inventions Edison developed at Menlo Park was a device that allowed the recording and reproduction of sound. Perfected a year after the move, the device was so extraordinary that Edison took it on tour the following year, demonstrating it before members of Congress and at the White House for President Rutherford B. Hayes. During the Washington trip, he visited the studio of famed photographer Mathew Brady, who made this portrait of the man and his machine.

• Thomas Edison and the Making of America