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The first ever microphone was an accidental discovery from a poor German immigrant named Emile Berliner. He first created a diaphragm transmitter using tin-cans and a soapbox, which later had a toy drum attached to a steel button linked to a metal wire. When contact was made between the diaphragm and the button, sound was transmitted and amplified. This invention's patent landed him a job as chief engineer at the Bell Telephone company. -
English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge (originally Edward James Muggeridge), experimented with photographing motion in 1872. Railroad magnate, Leland Stanford, had hired Eadweard to prove that all four legs of a horse are off the ground simultaneously when trotting. Muybridge did this by using a battery from 12-24 cameras and a special shutter he invented that gave an exposure of 2/1000 of a second. The first motion picture ever recorded was dubbed "The Horse in Motion". -
Famous 19th century inventor, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph while working on improvements to the telegraph and telephone. It used a tinfoil cylinder, 2 stylus' (one for recording and one for playback), and a mouthpiece. when talking into the mouthpiece, the sound vibration of Edison's voice was indented onto the cylinder. The first ever song recorded was "Mary had a little lamb". -
The first keyboard to have 'Shift' key was found on the Remington No. 2 typewriter on the left side of the keyboard. The name 'shift' originated from the action one had to take - in order to change from lower to uppercase on a typewriter, one had to press and hold the "switch" key down in order to shift up the case stamp to change to capital letters. -
Thomas Edison had built is first high resistance, incandescent electric light bulb in January 1879. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in a glass vacuum bulb, preventing the filament from burning.