‘And still the wonders grew’; soon after [my first experience of the telephone, my brothers and I] listened for the first time to the phonograph. It is true that this invention had been exhibited a few years previously in crude, experimental form at the Royal Institute, London, about 1879, but it was not until some years later, and well into the ‘eighties, that it began to make its appearance as a product purchasable by the public. Its invention convinced many of us that the age of miracles had indeed arrived when we could listen, in our homes, to great singers like Adelina Patti and Christine Nillson [Christina Nilsson], whenever we liked and merely by putting a wax cylinder on a roller and turning a handle.