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"In an interview in the October 1920 issue of The American Magazine, Edison confirmed that his scientific curiosity was intrigued by the nature of what happens to us after death. In his interview he posed the question, does our consciousness simply disappear as our bodies decompose or does some essence of our personality still linger in some form in this dimension of reality? Edison admitted that he didn't know, but the scientist in him wanted to find out whether that question could be answered. He told his interviewer that he was actively pursuing a device that would help him find that answer, saying, "I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us." For Edison, who took his inventions very seriously, this was not a simple throwaway remark, it was an announcement."

"Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented sound recording 20 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Sound had been invisible and transient since the beginning of time. Scott's phonautograph recorded it and made it both visible and perm­anent. It was a technological breakthrough, ahead of its time. He did not intend for his phon­autograms to be played back; that concept was another 20 years away."

"Both Guglielmo Marconi and Thomas Edison believed in the possibility of using new recording devices to contact the dead, or the "living impaired," to use Edison's uncanny twenty-first century­ term. Sir William Crooks, President of the Royal Society and inventor of the cathode ray tube, and Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the leading contribu­tors to radio t­echnology, believed the other world to be a wavelength into which we pass when we die."

"Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison's phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one."

"The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif."

"Four years after the invention of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell caused flurries of excitement with another invention, which he described in a series of essays and lectures in the US and Britain during the autumn of 1880. The device was what he called the 'photophone'. It depended upon the discovery made by Willoughby Smith in 1873, during the course of work on the Atlantic undersea telephone cable, that the resistance of the material selenium, which was ordinarily extremely high, in fact varied with the action of light, exposure to light lowering the resistance of the material."