Thomas Edison, long considered the inventor of recorded sound, had a rival who captured sound nearly two decades before Mr. Edison invented the phonograph.
Tomorrow at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif, eminent audio historian David Giovannoni will play a 10-second recording of “Au Clare de la Lune,” made in 1860, 17 years before “Mary had a little lamb” came out of Mr. Edison’s invention, the New York Times reports today.
The recording wasn’t intended to be audio, oddly enough. It was made on a device called a phonautograph, which used a stylus to trace sound waves onto a sheet of paper. The inventor was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a typesetter from Paris. When the phonograph reached mass popularity in the 1880s, it reproduced sounds using wax cylinders. (The cylinders could be delicate. One of them, belonging to MIT professor Henry Jenkins, was recently—and accidentally—broken by a mortified Chronicle writer, who went to great lengths to replace it.)
Though the phonautograph only traced the shapes of sound waves, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were able to scan these shapes and decipher the sounds they represented, eventually creating an audible snippet. —Josh Fischman
