The phonograph was invented by the American inventor and industrialist Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) in 1877, as a result of his work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone [1]. It is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sounds by means of the vibration of a stylus, or needle, following a groove on a rotating cylinder or disc (Fig. 1). On April 23, 1889, Edison himself presented an improved version of the phonograph at a meeting of the Académie des Sciences in Paris [2].

The attachment of the stylus to the diaphragm was further refined by Gianni Bettini (1860–1938), a pioneer audiophile who in 1890 invented a micro-phonograph [3]. Since its discovery and rapid commercialization, the phonograph attracted much interest in the field of medicine. The American physician specialized in laryngology Julius Mount Bleyer (1859–1915) largely experimented its use, and in 1888 was able to record the sounds of the heart [4] using a system that could be considered the precursor of phonocardiography. He also advocated the use of the phonograph for recording “coughs, nasal obstructions, laryngeal growths, laryngeal obstructions like stenosis, hoarseness, defection in speech, and many of an allied kind” [5].

In this article, we describe the earliest pioneering examples of the use of the phonograph for the study of neurological disorders and their course.