In the end, they named it the phonograph. But it might have been called the omphlegraph, meaning "voice writer." Or the antiphone (back talker). Or the didaskophone (portable teacher). These are some of the names someone wrote in a logbook in Thomas Edison's laboratory in 1877, after Edison and his assistantsrninvented the first rudimentary machine for recording and playing back sounds. From the first, they thought it would be used to reproduce the human voice, but they had no clear idea of its exact purpose.
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