The phonautograph invented by Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville
Have you ever heard the first recording ever made? Today you can. It was French inventor Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville who created a machine called the phonautograph, which made it possible to capture sound waves.
The phonautograph transcribed sound rather than recording it. A hog’s bristle was used to inscribe a sound’s waveform on lamp-blackened glass and later on paper. The sound waves were focused using a barrel like the one shown on the picture above.
The first recording of sound which was actually directly playable was done on Thomas Edison’s phonograph, the predecessor of the gramophone, the device we have been listening music on until the late 1980’s.
While scientists transcribed sounds using the phonautograph, their main goal was to study acoustics, unaware of the fact that we are able to play back what turned out to be about the first recording ever made, 150 years later.
There is no device for directly playing back these phonautograph recordings, but with modern technology and computers, we can use software to translate the visually transcribed sound waves back into audible sound waves. And this is what is sounds like:
In this recording from April 9, 1860 we can clearly hear a man’s voice (probably Scott de Martinville himself) sing the French folk song Au Clair de la Lune, amongst the crackling and noise. Apart from what this recording from sounds like, is it not wonderful to be able to listen to these sounds from the past?
A group of enthusiasts founded First Sounds, an informal collaborative of sound archivists, recording engineers and scientists aiming to make the first recordings made in mankind available to “all people for all time”.