Emile Berliner’s first disc talking machine (Gramophone) exhibited in 1888

Today in 1888, Emile Berliner demonstrated the flat gramophone disc and its reproduction at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. F. W. Wile: “Emile Berliner took human sound, whether uttered in speech or song, and reproduced it, not as a parody as in the tinfoil phonograph, or in the wax-cylinder graphophone… but in accurate and fadeless form, to echo down the ages as long as time endures. He enabled mankind to ‘hold communion with immortality.’”

Jack Mullin and Murdo McKenzie (technical producer for the Bing Crosby show)

Also today, in 1946, Jack Mullin gave the first public demonstration of professional-quality tape recording in Americaat a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, now IEEE) in San Francisco.