On December 7, 1877, Thomas Edison walked into the offices of Scientific American in New York City and placed a metal device on a desk. With a turn of a crank, Edison astonished the dozen or so staffers who had gathered around the contraption.The machine spoke. “Good morning,” it said in Edison’s voice. “How do you do?”SciAm’s editors described the demonstration in the December 22, 1877, issue. “There can be no doubt,” they wrote, “but that the inflections are those of nothing else than the human voice.” Accompanying the report was a detailed sketch of Edison’s device, which the inventor called a phonograph.Virtually overnight, the article catapulted Edison to fame and established the phonograph as the first machine to record and reproduce human speech.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.But was it?On May 15, 2026, at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in Memphis, audio historian Patrick Feaster proposed another candidate for the title—a recording machine that would have preceded Edison’s by nearly a century.Feaster, a tenacious researcher with a photographic mind for everything phonographic, began investigating this possibility more than 20 years earlier, when he came across a German article from the early 1900s surveying mechanical devices that synthesized (but did not record) some of the sounds of human speech. The article mentioned a man identified only by his last name, Müller, who had exhibited some kind of talking machine in the 1780s. Although the article’s author branded Müller’s machine an obvious hoax, Feaster was intrigued.His occasional investigations over the following two decades uncovered additional references to Müller and his “speaking machine,” including a book describing the device from 1788—the same year the machine was exhibited in Erlangen, Germany.Feaster found two eyewitness accounts that agreed on the details. The speaking machine was apparently about 3.5 feet wide and 2.5 feet high, deep and flanked by two life-size human figures—one male and one female. Each figure rested a hand on top of a cabinet that featured 34 “speech mechanisms” resembling organ pipes, along with levers, rollers, cylinders, clockwork mechanisms and 10 bellows. But Feaster also found other accounts that described Müller’s device as a puppet that conversed with audiences.