October 1

Born on the 1st in 1842, Charles Cros was a man who lived his life with both feet planted firmly in the outskirts of fame and accomplishment. He came remarkably close to almost inventing the phonograph. On April 30, 1877, he submitted a sealed envelope to the Academy of Science in Paris. Contained in the envelope was a description of a device for making sound recordings capable of being stored and played back at will. Cros’ proposal for such a machine was read in public on the following December 3rd. Before he had an opportunity to build a working model of this groundbreaking device however, Thomas Edison, working independently, introduced a working model of his own phonograph, which Edison patented on January 15, 1878. Cros was a man of many talents. He also worked on the photograph equipment of the late nineteenth century and almost came up an improvement. Undeterred by these little set backs, Gros then turned his gaze to the stars. Cros became convinced that the pinpoints of light that he and others had observed on Mars and Venus were the lights of large cities on those planets. He spent years petitioning the French government to build a giant mirror that could be used to communicate with the Martians and Venusians by burning giant lines on the deserts of those planets. Cros was never convinced that the Martians were not a proven fact, or that the mirror he wanted to build was technically impossible. One possible explanation for Cros’ behavior might be that in addition to being an inventor he was also a poet. That of course means he was, at times, completely out of his mind.