Artist Luke Jerram once designed a projector wedding ring for himself. Before that, he made one for his bride, Shelina Nanji. It’s made of silver and engraved with a 20-second message that is audible when played on a special phonograph:

100 lbf/in² of pressure was required to cut the silver ring, using a vibrating diamond stylus. The ring is also a homage to Thomas Edison who made the first sound recording machine – the phonograph in 1877.

Using the ring, I proposed to Shelina in a hot air balloon over Bristol in 2005. We’ve since got married and had 2 children Maya and Nico.

You can see a video of the ring being played at the link.

Link via Make | Photo: Luke Jerram

In the 1970s, cheap sonosheets (phonograph records printed on thin, flexible sheets of vinyl) became quite the rage in Japan. Like all fads, these recordings have largely disappeared – but you can still gawk at the fantastic cover art over at Pink Tentacle:

Widely available from a variety of publishers, the most popular sonosheets featured theme music from TV anime, manga and tokusatsu, and they often came packaged inside booklets featuring colorful artwork. The sonosheet boom was short-lived, though — many companies went under as the market became flooded in the 1970s, and the phenomenon all but disappeared by the 1980s. Here is a small sample of the vast array of sonosheet cover art from that era.

Link

Just because you’re driving in your car, it doesn’t mean that you can’t take your hi-fi music with you. Here’s a Chrysler innovation: a phonograph for your car.

In 1956 they teamed with CBS to create the “Highway Hi-Fi” – an under-dash phonograph that played vinyl records at a super-slow 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. The slow speed allowed a small disc to pack up to an hour of entertainment on each side. Special mechanical engineering reduced the number of times and distance the needle would skip across the disc as the car drove over bumps in the road.

With innovations like these, we simply can’t believe the how the company got into the economic trouble they’re in right now!

Link – via Sunshine Supercars, Thanks Jo. A. Borras!

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Things You Didn’t Know about General Motors