During the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, mass production and manufacturing of goods began to expand rapidly. With these changes also came a change in fuel sources, which began to shift towards more modern forms such as oil and electricity. With these changes in production and power came new possibilities and ideas. Many great thinkers have engaged in technological progress by taking advantage of the changes brought about by the second industrial revolution. Thomas Edison became one of America's greatest inventors during this period. While working on a way to record telegraph messages using paper indents, Thomas Edison had the idea that a conversation held on the telephone could be recorded in a similar way. On November 21, 1877, Thomas Edison publicly announced that he had invented a device capable of recording sound: the phonograph. This invention would have a major impact around the world at the time and to this day forms the basis not only for recorded telephone messages, but for all forms of recorded audio. What led to the invention of the phonograph? Thomas Edison had many inventions and patents at the time, one of which was the automatic telegraph. Edison began work on a machine that could store telegraph messages. His idea was to memorize these massages on paper as a series of indentations. Subsequently, these stored telegraph messages could be sent telegraphically again. However, during Edison's work to improve the telegraph, he noticed that inserting paper into the telegraph produced a sound similar to the human voice. As Edison stated, "there is no doubt that I will be able to memorize and automatically reproduce the human voice perfectly at any time in the future." Edison gave his mechanic... half the paper... a series of indentations on a physical medium. By creating the phonograph, Edison left a huge impact on the entire way we experience entertainment and communicate. Starting the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company on January 24, 1878, he is also responsible for laying the foundation for the audio recording industry. Edison's phonograph was able to reach many more people than would have been possible with lectures and live performances. Musical recordings would serve to bridge the gap between people in a time when financial and ethnic differences were further segregating the population. Today we still benefit from the foundation laid by the phonograph. We can easily listen to all forms of audio from around the world, and with the advent of the third industrial revolution and the Internet, recorded audio connects people around the world more than ever.