Elisha Gray was an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. Gray is best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876 in Highland Park, Illinois. Some recent authors have argued that Gray should be considered the true inventor of the telephone because Alexander Graham Bell allegedly stole the idea of the liquid transmitter from him, although Bell had been using liquid transmitters in his telephone experiments for mo

In 1956 Charles P. Ginsburg and Ray Dolby of Ampex Corporation, a U.S. electronics firm, developed the first practical videotape recorder. Their machine revolutionized television broadcasting; recorded shows virtually replaced live telecasts with a few exceptions, such as coverage of sports events. Almost all programs are videotaped during their original telecasts, and individual broadcasters then rerun the shows at times most suitable for their own viewers. An increasing num

The phonograph is a device, invented in 1877, for the mechanical recording and reproduction of sound. In its later forms, it is also called a gramophone, or, since the 1940s, a record player. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus t

Guglielmo Marconi, is popularly known as “the inventor of radio,” a mischaracterization that critics and supporters of his many rivals are quick to seize upon. Marconi was actually the first person to use radio waves to communicate. His first patent was for “Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses and Signals and in Apparatus Therefor,” and he considered what he was doing to be a form of wireless telegraphy. But Marconi was indeed the first truly global figure in mo