His voice came through tinny and distant, and not all his words were intelligible.

They loved it.

Edison knew his device was rough, but he saw potential. So, on December 24, the United States Patent Office received his application for a “Phonograph or Speaking Machine.”

Edison’s phonograph was a precursor to the record player: the first device to capture sound and play it back faithfully. His machinist threw it together, skeptical it would work. Edison made it function—with tinfoil. Even he was surprised they pulled it off.

Edison had already tinkered with telegraphs and telephones before tackling sound recording, and he likely knew about the phonautograph, a 1857 French device that recorded sound visually (but could not play it back). That spark was enough to send the inventor chasing a mechanical device that could bottle sound.

Here’s how the phonograph worked: You turned a handle and spoke (or sang) into a cylinder, and the vibrations jostled a needle. The needle scratched sound waves onto a strip of tinfoil. Reverse the crank and the tinfoil, and the machine could “read” the grooves back. It was flawed, fragile, and astonishing.

Edison first imagined Business dictation and educational uses. Before long, though, he saw a bigger opportunity: bringing music into homes. At the time, if you wanted to hear music, you had to go where someone was playing it live or play it yourself. It took a few years for the phonograph to catch on—and Edison stepped away for nearly a decade to perfect incandescent light—but by 1903, the device was a hit.

Suddenly, people could listen to music privately, repeatedly, and at their own discretion. Edison’s company sold cylinders with two-minute recordings of, well, everything: waltzes, vaudeville acts, opera arias, marching tunes, jazz, blues, even artistic whistling.

Edison refined his phonograph again and again, calling it his “baby” in a 1878 interview. However, by 1929, the market was flooded with similar machines that played flat discs instead of cumbersome cylinders, and Edison discontinued phonograph sales.

Of course, the idea still echoes today. The phonograph gave us the ability, for the first time in history, to keep a musical performance and play it again and again—think of that the next time you cue up Spotify.