On this day the inventor Thomas Edison went into the offices of the magazine Scientific American and placed a little machine, his prototype phonograph, on one of the office desks. Then, as one of the witnesses later recalled, “The visitor, without any ceremony, turned the crank, and to everybody’s astonishment the machine said: ‘Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?’ It was Edison’s first major invention and the one that earned him the nickname “the wizard of Menlo Park” because it was so unexpected that it seemed magical to the general public.
