At the turn of the twentieth century, entrepreneur Eldridge Reeves Johnson founded what could be considered the first consumer electronics company, the Victor Talking Machine Company, which manufactured and sold a fully-mechanized version of Emile Berliner's Gramophone. While not technically an "electronic" product, the Gramophone was the first patented consumer leisure device that anyone could use and enjoy, a prototype for the millions of products to follow in the next 100 years, and the first of only a handful of truly revolutionary or foundational products that include radio, television, the personal computer, the camcorder and the cell phone.

Even from the beginning, Johnson and other visionaries, such as David Sarnoff, Akio Morito and Steve Jobs, understood that consumers wanted access to their technology and media when and wherever they were. Products shrunk from transportable into belt-clipable, bulky lead-acid batteries turned into tiny lithium cells, vacuum tubes turned into transistors then into microchips, mechanical playback turned into laser, screens turned from CRT into LCD, connecting wires turned into cell networks, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But these visionaries were always out in front, providing technologies that prompted and often created consumer demand.

But the biggest change that the twenty-first century may bring in the consumer electronics industry may not be new product or media forms, but how consumers access and control that product and media. In the past, technological limitations forced function to follow form. But speedy wireless networks, fiber optic infrastructure, the Internet, physically smaller yet higher capacity hard drives and data compression have turned this form-dictated usage paradigm on its head. Consumers are merging these new technologies more intuitively than previous generations, and see the opportunities for greater functions and access that are greater than the sum of the technological parts. For the first time, consumer demand for advanced products and capabilities is running behind and prompting technological development instead of the other way around.

In many ways, technological advancement to fulfill consumer needs and expectations is being stymied not by physics but by potential piracy. Copy protection issues such as digital rights management, broadcast flags and watermarking are slowing down development and unification of technologies that would give enable consumers universal and untethered access to their content around the home or the world.

Where there is a will, there is a way. Just like it took decades for the aforementioned technologies to become mainstream and integrated into our everyday lives, consumer desire and profit motives will combine to resolve today's contentious issues. In this way, the history of the last century of consumer electronics innovation provides some comfort for anyone anxious about today's developments -- we always eventually end up with the products we need and that consumers want.

Electricity, Energy & Bell
But the consumer electronics past begins before Johnson and Victor Talking Machines. By definition, the consumer electronics era begins with the discovery and development of electricity.

It is said that around 600 BC, Thales of Miletus, one of the legendary Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece, found that rubbing pieces of amber together produced an effect much like magnetism, but not quite.

In 1570, English scientist William Gilbert continued Thales' amber-rubbing experiments and called the result "electric," a modification of the Greek and Latin words for amber. In 1650, the term "electricity" was coined to refer to the resulting force.

Benjamin Franklin performed his shocking experiments with a kite and made his subsequent discovery and definition of positive and negative electrical charges in 1752. By 1800, Italian Alessandro Volta, for whom the "volt" is named, figured out how to produce electricity in steady current. English physicist Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic rotation in 1821.

In 1827, German George Ohm published his eponymous law concerning voltage, current and resistance that makes possible all manner of electrical and speaker wiring. Faraday, simultaneously with American scientist Joseph Henry, discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831, making possible all future electric motors and electrical generators.

But there were still no electrical gadgets, until Henry, working with an obscure painter named Samuel F.B. Morse, used the principal of magnetic induction to invent the first electronic communications device, the telegraph in 1837.

In 1836, British John Frederic Daniell combined copper and zinc and created the Daniell cell, the forerunner of today's batteries. In 1839, young Frenchman Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel discovered the photovoltaic effect - power from light - without which most solar calculators would be useless. Between 1856 and 1873, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell defined electromagnetism, leading the development of every electrical product that followed. The first such breakthrough using Faraday's and Maxwell's theories was the development of the AC induction motor by Nikola Tesla in the mid-1880s.

The Phonograph
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 Alexander Graham Bell 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, NJ, 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.

AC/DC
Edison's most important contributions to modern consumer electronics are not the phonograph or incandescent light, but the central power station and something called "The Edison Effect."

The first thing you do when you buy a stereo, TV or any electronic device is plug it into a wall socket. This simple act is possible because Edison spent almost his entire fortune and risked his substantial reputation to build the Pearl Street power station in lower Manhattan in 1882.

When Edison gave the order to flip the switch on Sept. 4, 1882, he asked that there be light, and there was light. Stores all along Fulton and Nassau streets, the editorial offices of The New York Times and the brokerage house of Drexel Morgan were lit up with Edison's incandescent light bulbs that his power station fueled. The world had changed forever.

But Edison was producing direct current, which was dangerous and difficult to transmit efficiently over long distances because it flowed only one way. An alternate method of transmitting electricity over long distances was invented by a nearly penniless Croatian immigrant named Nikola Tesla, who arrived in America after working in the Paris offices of the Continental Edison Co. (ConEd). After being rejected by Edison, Tesla developed and brought his electrical transmission scheme to George Westinghouse.

After a bitter decade-long fight between Edison and Westinghouse, a battle that accidentally resulted in the invention of the electric chair, alternating current (AC), which allowed electricity to flow bi-directionally, reigned supreme. AC remains the standard for transmitting electricity from power plants to homes and businesses around the world.