The telephone answering machine, the predecessor of today’s voicemail, doesn’t seem like a very exciting technology, but there is a lot of history behind it. In fact, it was intended to be one of the original uses for the first commercial sound recorder, the phonograph. In 1878, shortly after inventing his phonograph, Thomas Edison created a “top ten list” of uses of the phonograph. Number ten read:

“Connection with the telephone, so as take that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication”

But it didn’t work out quite that way. Instead, phonographs for musical entertainment filled the marketplace, especially after 1890. Plus, it was just too difficult to capture a good recording using the phonographs and telephones of the day — both were very crude devices.  The sound quality possible with a phonograph would gradually improve, but real key was making a direct electrical connection between the engraving stylus of the phonograph recorder and the electrical “receiver” (the ear-piece) of the telephone. Edison realized that, but just couldn’t get it to work very well.

Years later, in the late 1920s, several record companies began experimenting with the earliest “electronic” equipment in the recording studio. They developed electromagnetic cutters to make records, and fed music to them using microphones and amplifiers like those already in use in radio studios.

In other words, they found a way to feed the electrical impulses from a telephone “transmitter” (today it would be called a microphone) to the new electromagnetic phonograph recording units. The key was the electronic amplifier, which strengthened the weak output of the microphone enough to operate the electromagnetic recorders effectively.

Inventors, still intrigued by the possibility of recording the telephone, took note.