Modern Marvels: Gadgets - Acura - HISTORY

Companies such as Acura bring new technologies to automobiles.

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On January 7, 1927, the first official transatlantic telephone call is made when W. S. Gifford, president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, calls Sir Evelyn P. Murray, secretary of the General Post Office of Great Britain, on the new commercial circuit.

On April 9, 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville made a recording on a "phonautograph," which worked by tracing sound waves onto paper blackened by smoke. Unplayable for more than a century, the recording was recently brought to life by new audio technology. On the recording, Scott is heard singing a snippet from the French folksong "Au Clair de la Lune."

In the early 1880s, in an effort to secure a patent of his own after Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph, Alexander Graham Bell made a number of experimental recordings using a variety of methods. New audio technology has allowed some of Bell's earliest recordings to be played without damaging the originals. In one recently recovered recording, Bell himself recites a line from "Mary Had a Little Lamb."