Today's article is going to be short, but it does contain an interesting little tidbit you've probably never heard about. If you don't know, Robert Browning is a famous English poet who lived from 1812 to 1889. He gained quite a lot of popularity, and I would list some of his works but none of them seem familiar to be (though I don't know too many poems). What this entire post deals with is connecting Robert Browning with Thomas Edison.
Thomas Edison invented, among thousands of other things, the phonograph. While we think of them as playing the flat round disks, but Edison's invention used a round cylinder with a wax covering and the first words played were "Mary had a little lamb...." Now you might be wondering where in the world I'm going with this but as it turns out Robert Browning was the first person to have their voice heard after they were dead.
In April of 1889 at a dinner party he recorded on one of Edison's phonographs the poem "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." Browning then died in December of the same year, but on the anniversary of his death in 1890 a group of his admirers played the recording and it was the first time anyone had been heard by others once they had passed on.
Hope you found this little piece of information interesting.
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