Edison(2)

Edison (2) "The American invents as the Greek sculpted and the Italian painted," the Times of London reported, "it is genius." But of all the wonders in evidence that spring of 1876, none was more astonishing than Alexander Graham Bell's telephone — a revolutionary device that converted sound waves into an electrical signal, and promised to replace the telegrapher's dots and dashes with the sound of the human voice. For Edison, there were few more powerful catalysts than competition. "I don't care too much for a fortune," he once said, "as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows." Bell — college educated and bankrolled by his future father-in-law — was the ideal adversary. It would take Edison and his team mere months to design a device that trumped Bell's — a so-called "carbon button transmitter" that carried sound over much longer distances and turned the telephone into a commercially viable device. In the process, Edison stumbled upon the invention that would change his life forever. Initial experiments quickly gave rise to sketches for a crude machine Edison called a phonograph — from the ancient Greek, meaning "writer of sound.” When the machine was finished, the men in the shop gathered round, breathless as Edison recited into the diaphragm the classic nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb. Over the next several months, as sales agents fanned out across the country with demonstration models of the device, the phonograph's inventor became a full-fledged press sensation.