Researchers Play Tune Recorded 17 Years Before Edison
Researchers have uncovered an old recording of the human voice. Not impressed? You should be. The recording predates Thomas Edison's 1877 recording of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" by nearly two decades.
The 10-second clip of a unknown person singing the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was recorded by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville in 1860. According to an article in today's New York Times, Scott, a typesetter and tinkerer from Paris, created a "barrel shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp."
These etched pieces of paper -- called "phonautgrams" -- were not meant for audio playback, at least not at the outset. They were created to provide a paper visual record of human speech that could hopefully be deciphered later (by someone like Edison!). It took a while for de Martinville's "recordings" to actually produced audio, but according to the Times article, "Lawrence Berkeley Scientists utilized optical imaging and a 'virtual stylus' on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago."
Historians have known about Scott's work for quite some time. It was David Giavannoni, an audio historian, and a group of his peers, however, that first attempted to actually find Scott's recordings and try to play them back. They began their search in earnest this fall.
This is the earliest recording of sound ever discovered. It is however, not the first playable recording. Is one discovery more important than the other? Did Edison get credit for merely tweaking an idea that had already been established? Or does the primitive nature of Scott's etched papers render them inferior? Let the debate begin.
From New York Times
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