The history of magnetic recording began with the telegraph. When Samuel F. B. Morse sent an electrical signal for "What hath God wrought!" over a wire from Washington to Baltimore in 1844, he created a new technology and industry. Over the years, inventors sought to improve the telegraph. Alexander Graham Bell at the 1876 World's Fair in Philadelphia unveiled to the public a device that for the first time turned mechanical sound waves into electrical current and back again. He spoke into a microphone and his voice came out from a vibrating diaphragm speaker. The telephone was an instant success, won a prize at the Fair, launched what would become the world's largest communication company, and influenced countless others to improve the technology of sound recording. Thomas Edison was influenced by Bell's work to create the cylinder phonograph in 1877. When Oberlin Smith visited Edison's lab at Menlo Park NJ in early 1878, he was inspired to improve the phonograph by a different method, using a magnetizing coil to record sound on wire rather than Edison's method of using a needle to etch a wavy groove on a wax cylinder. He did not succeed, but wrote an accurate description in a memorandum Sept. 23, 1878, and wrote an article for Electrical World in Sept. 1888 that was also published in French by La Lumiere Electrique. The idea was in the air.
