But apparently his âsinkerâ made quite an impression on Warden. Like many other guys trying to hang on to a big league job, Ribant was clever in finding a way to get hitters out, conventional or otherwise. His âsinkerâ turned out to beâ¦the âspitballâ. Now the idea behind a âspitterâ is not some wet, gooey mess, but rather to create a âheavyâ spot on the baseball, thereby causing it to have greater wind resistance and sink dramatically when it gets to within a few feet of home plate.
When Benjamin Franklin invented his mechanical version of the instrument in 1761, he called it the armonica, based on the Italian word armonia, which means harmony. The unrelated free-reed wind instrument aeolina, today called the  harmonica , was not invented until 1821, sixty years later.
Thomas Alva Edison announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording an â¦ d replaying sound, on November 21 1877 and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19 1878 as US Patent 200,521).he Dictaphone was still in use in the early 1950's. The first flat, circular record was invented in 1887 by Emile Berliner (1851-1929), a German-born American inventor, who also devised the gramophone to play his disks. Berliner's records were originally made of glass, then zinc, and later, hard rubber.