Edison Recorded Sound Twenty Years Too Late

The phonograph was the first
device to both record and
play back audio.
CC image courtesy of
Norman Bruderhofer
on Wikipedia.

In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the first device to both record and play back audio recordings using tin foil and later wax.  You have likely seen a picture of one at some point in your life, but if not, there is a picture of one to the right.  Many people consider to be the first device to record sound, but as it turns out that is not actually true.  Twenty years prior to Edison's phonograph, a Frenchman designed and built a machine that was the first ever to capture sound on a recording.

The Phonautograph was the First Device Able to Record Sound

What most people are not aware of, nor was I until recently, is that there was an earlier device invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in France in 1857, that was the first device built to record sounds out of the air.  The phonautograph, as it is known, records sound as a wavy line drawn on a piece of parchment, similar, but far more rudimentary, to what you can see when viewing an audio recording on a computer.  While this was the first known recording of sound, Scott had no way of converting that wavy line back into sound again.  It seems pointless, but at the time it was remarkable to just be able to look at a recording of sound, to try and study the waveform drawn.

In 1857, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the first
device capable of recording sound.  The horn amplified the
sound, vibrating a stylus that drew a recording onto parchment
wrapped around the cylinder at the back.

Converting a Recording Back Into Sound

It was not until 2008, however, that the technology existed to convert that drawing on paper back into sound.  A team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory known as First Sounds took the recordings Scott made using the phonautograph and analyzed them via computer in order to extract as much data as possible.  The result was sound, though it is impossible to make out much of anything from it.  Here is the oldest known phonautograph recording from August 17, 1857, 156 years ago, that has been converted back into sound. (playing the audio requires Internet Explorer 9 or above, or any of the newer versions of Firefox, Chrome, or Opera.  If the player below doesn't work, you can download the audio.)



The recording varies in pitch considerably because the phonautograph is rotated by hand, which resulted in an uneven recording speed.  It would be like a record player (or CD player...  MP3... how about Pandora playlist?) that you had to hand-crank.  As much as the researchers have tried to correct for the change in recording speed, they have yet been unable because they have no reference point to correct to.  The result is completely unrecognizable as a human voice, though from the inscription, it is thought to be a song of some kind.

Corrected Audio Reveals a Human Voice

Later recordings included the sound from a tuning fork ringing as well, which allowed researchers to correct to that specific frequency, also correcting the recorded sound in the process.  This results in audio, while not much clearer than before, that is at least recognizable as a human voice.  The following is a recording of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville singing "Au Clair de la Lune," or "By the Light of the Moon" on April 20th, 1860.  This one is really the one that piqued my interest in this topic as I instantly get a feeling of peering through time to a world barely known by recordings, either photographs or audio.  It definitely has an eerie quality to it.  Again, the audio can be downloaded if your browser doesn't support the player below.



Just the fact that we are able to hear anything from a recording made over 150 years ago amazes me.  It seems like such a silly and boring subject, but this is one of those little bits of history that draws me in.  Just like the eighty-six year old pitch drop experiment, I am fascinated by the simplicity of the experiment, along with the patience Scott must have had to build the device and record the audio four years before the start of the American Civil War.  This was the time of my parents' parents' parents' parents' parents.  This was a time when construction of the rail system in the United States was starting to take off, when slavery was still legal.  James Buchanan was just the 15th President of the United States, yet for as long ago as that was, we are able to listen back to that time and hear the voice of a man who has been dead 134 years.  That is just awesome.