By; Keith Shipp

1877 Thomas Alva Edison, working in his lab, succeeds in recovering Mary's Little Lamb from a strip of tinfoil wrapped around a spinning cylinder.

1878  The first music is put on record: cornet's Jules Levy plays "Yankee Doodle."

1881  Clement Adder, using carbon microphones and armature headphones, accidentally produces a stereo effect when listeners outside the hall monitor adjacent telephone lines linked to stage mikes at the Paris Opera.

1887  Emile Berliner is granted a patent on a flat-disc gramophone, making the production of multiple copies practical.

1888  Edison introduces an electric motor- driven phonograph.

1895  Marconi successfully experiments with his wireless telegraphy system in Italy, leading to the first transatlantic signals from Poldhu, Cornwall, UK to St. John's, Newfoundland in 1901.

1898  Valdemar Poulsen patents his "Telegraphone," recording magnetically on steel wire.

1900  Poulsen unveils his invention to the public at the Paris Exposition. Austria's Emperor Franz Josef records his congratulations.

1901  The Victor Talking Machine Company is founded by Emile Berliner and Eldridge Johnson.  Experimental optical recordings are made on motion picture film.

1906  Lee Deforest invents the triode vacuum tube, the first electronic signal amplifier.

1910  Enrico Caruso is heard in the first live broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, NYC.

1912  Major Edwin F. Armstrong is issued a patent for a regenerative circuit, making radio reception practical.

1913  The first "talking movie" is demonstrated by Edison using his Kinetophone process, a cylinder player mechanically synchronized to a film projector.

1916  A patent for the super heterodyne circuit is issued to Armstrong.  The Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) is formed.  Edison does live-versus-recorded demonstrations in Carnegie Hall, NYC.

1917  The Scully disk recording lathe is introduced.  E. C. Wente of Bell Telephone Laboratories publishes a paper in Physical Review describing a "uniformly sensitive instrument for the absolute measurement of sound intensity" -- the condenser microphone.

1919  The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) is founded. It is owned in part by United Fruit.

1921  The first commercial AM radio broadcast is made by KDKA, Pittsburgh PA.

1925  Bell Labs develops a moving armature lateral cutting system for electrical recording on disk. Concurrently they Introduce the Victor Orthorhombic Victrola, "Credenza" model. This all- acoustic player -- with no electronics -- is considered a leap forward in phonograph design.

1926 O'Neill patents iron oxide-coated paper tape.