playing audio books for the sight impaired. A year later the Royal institute of Blind People in London introduced their ‘Talking Books’ service. 1940 – Multi track recording developed. The guitarist, composer and technician Les Paul experimented with multi track recordings and his experiments lead to the development of 4 and 8 track recordings. These were later adopted by all the major studio’s in the 60’s with many of the Beatle’s and Rolling Stone’s Albums being the first to have 4 track records. Walt Disney’s animated feature Fantasia was one of the first commercial appearances of a four-track record, producing something similar to what is now known as surround sound. 1948 – All the major American labels introduce Vinyl records. (Shellac records are still available.) 1963 – Phillips develops the cassette tape. Their compact audio cassette was the first to combine to convenience of a tape recording format that did not require manual threading. It took about a decade before cassettes began to dominate the consumer market. 1964 – Vinyl records become the worldwide industry standard. Shellac discs are no longer produced commercially. Phonautograph The first device that could record actual sounds as they passed through the air (but could not play them back—the purpose was only visual study) was the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The earliest known recordings of the human voice are phonautograph recordings, called phonautograms, made in 1857. They consist of sheets of paper with sound-wave-modulated white lines created by a vibrating stylus that cut through a coating of soot as the paper was passed under it. An 1860 phonautogram of Au Clair de la Lune, a French folk song, was played back as sound for the first time in 2008 by scanning it and using software to convert the undulating line, which graphically encoded the sound, into a corresponding digital audio file. Phonograph Thomas Edison's work on two other innovations, the telegraph and the telephone, led to the development of the phonograph. Edison was working on a machine in 1877 that would transcribe telegraphic signals onto paper tape, which could then be transferred over the telegraph again and again. The phonograph was both in a cylinder and a disc form. Cylinder On April 30, 1877, French poet, humorous writer and inventor Charles Cros submitted a sealed envelope containing a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Paris fully explaining