The Phonograph Astounds the World When Edison presented his invention - which he dubbed the phonograph - to his intellectual peers, they were taken aback. His fellow inventors couldn't have been more amazed. It is difficult for anyone exposed to recorded sound since childhood to imagine the reaction to the first phonograph demonstrations. The experience transcended science and took on a surreal quality for some of these early exhibition audiences. As Tom Gunning puts it when he refers to the phenomen of expositions used to introduce new technology to consumers: Primary among these is the paradoxical celebration in these festivals of the novel in the guise of the eternal, and of the technological in the form of magic. When Edison’s device ‘spoke’ in 1878, it was a more intense experience than any scientist could have imagined, excepting Cros perhaps. Paul D. Miller helps to relate the enormity of the experience when the needle hit the record for the first time: You have to remember, Edison, a lot of the early cats involved with this stuff, they really looked at it as a far more mystical kind of thing. Edison truly thought it would allow him to talk to the dead. . . Its just one of these things, if you look at the detritus of World War II, where the computer was generated as a device for dealing with large numbers. Or, you look at what was going on with electricity, somebody like Tesla, he made these huge coils, just booming bass system for miles. When you flip that into a metaphor, its like you can just see the abstraction already, so electricity is information, sound is information. The mind itself is just a framework to look at the information. Miller's comparison of the phonograph to the work of Turing and Tesla is helpful when trying to distill the essence of Edison's creations: the dawn of the Information Age was clearly visible in the rear-view mirror of the first phonograph demonstrations, the immaterial had been given material form and importance.