In 1876, the year of America's centennial, Alexander Graham Bell took the telegraph to its next logical step by sending sound through the wires, resulting in the telephone. The resulting gadget became the first piece of electronics found in the home. But it would be the only piece until electricity itself was brought into American homes.

The first consumer electronics product wasn't electronic at all, at least not at first. A year after Bell invented the telephone, Thomas Edison became the most famous and admired man in America. In December 1877, he sketched a diagram of a strange device and asked one of his technicians in his Menlo Park, N.J., lab to build it. When the technician brought back the machine, he asked his boss what it was. Edison adjusted the great horn that had a needle attached to a wax cylinder covered with tin foil. Turning a crank on the side, he shouted into the horn, "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go."

Edison then readjusted the horn and its needle, which had just scratched a path on the tin foil, then turned the crank again. To the amazement of the assembled technicians, out of the horn came Edison's words precisely as he had spoken them. Thus was born the first sound reproduction device, the phonograph, and with it, the legend of the Wizard of Menlo Park.

Even wizards, however, don't create perfection the first time out. The phonograph initially languished as a consumer product. It wasn't until almost 20 years later that the phonograph made it into consumers' homes, and it wasn't Edison who put it there. A German-born telephone expert named Emile Berliner flattened out Edison's wax cylinder and created a disc, then figured out a way to motorize the whole operation.

But it took an entrepreneur named Eldridge Reeves Johnson to put Edison's and Berliner's advances to work, and to create the first true consumer electronics company. Johnson founded the Victor Talking Machine Company, which successfully marketed the Gramophone, the first record player. In 1907, the Gramophone as furniture, the Victrola, was introduced, and recorded music now was available to the masses.

But the Gramophone was no more a consumer "electronics" product than Edison's original. Gramophones were actually entirely mechanical when they first hit the market in 1900. Record players wouldn't be electrified until the mid-1920s. By then, another electrical product would stake its claim as the first consumer electronics product.