phonautograph recording of Au Clair de la Lune is now considered the earliest recognizable record of the human voice and the earliest recognizable record of music. 1877 – Charles Cros invents the Paleophone. Paris was clearly the centre of the world in the early days of sound recording. It was there that Leon Scott de Martinville invented his Phonautograph to capture sound onto paper in 1857 and 20 years later Charles Cros took the process forward by working out how to record sound onto a cylinder by tracing oscillations using a screw. In April 1877 he wrote a paper describing his thesis and submitted it in a sealed envelope to the Academy of Science in Paris. Before he got a chance to build a prototype, a hard working inventor by the name of Thomas Edison living thousands of miles away in the USA beat him to it. Edison had been independently considering the same problem and in late 1877 he built a machine that recorded and played back sound which he called a Phonograph. Edison became world famous whilst Charles Cros is largely forgotten. 1878 – Thomas Edison perfects a cylinder based Phonograph that he invented the previous year. It expanded on the principles of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville‘s phonautograph and recorded sound onto a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder, and could both record and reproduce sounds. His first recording? It was the nursery rhyme “Mary’s got little lamb.”He also sets up the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company in the same year. 1880’s – Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell working under Alexander Graham Bell at his Volta Labaratory improved the phonograph cylinder including developing wax covered cardboard cylinders, ultimately creating a new form of recording machine: the Graphophone. 1887 – Emile Berliner changes the game by inventing the gramophone. Briefly based on cylinders, Berliner changed his methodology in 1888 to use discs with imprinted grooves on the flat side of a disc rather than the outside of a cylinder. He initially envisioned his invention would be a toy. 1888 – Columbia Records is born out of Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Graphophone Company. Columbia Records named after its home state, broke away from the North American Phonograph Company selling records and phonographs manufactured by Columbia itself. 1889 – William Barry Owen and Trevor Lloyd Williams register the Gramophone Company in London. On February 23, 1889, William Barry Owen and Trevor Lloyd Williams