Leon Scott Leon Scott Leon Scott and the Phonautograph Scott phonautograph from Smithsonian Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville was born in France in 1817. As a printer by trade, he was able to read accounts of the latest scientific discoveries and became an inventor. On March 25, 1857, he received French patent #17,897/31,470 for the phonautograph. This device made a visual image of sound waves on a cylinder, but did not play or reproduce any sounds. Scott used a horn to collect sound, a diaphragm at the end of the horn that vibrated from the sound, a stiff brush bristle attached to the diaphragm, and a rotating cylinder covered with lampblack or blackened paper that recorded the wavy lines from the vibrating diaphragm and bristle. He also used flat discs to trace the lateral motions of his bristle, as Emile Berliner would later do with his gramophone.

One of Scott's cylinder machines (pictured at left) has been preserved in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, although it is incorrectly labeled as the "first machine to record sound." Scott, with the help of Rudolph Koenig who made musical instruments at 27 Quai d'Anjou in Paris, constructed some machines for scientific purposes, but he was not able to profit from his invention and spent the remainder of his life as a librarian and bookseller at 9 rue Vivienne in Paris. He died April 26, 1879, two years after Edison's invention. Despite his claims that he was the true inventor of the phonograph, Scott was never able to do what Edison did, to make indentations on a cylinder that could vibrate a diaphragm as did the original sound waves. In 1877, another French inventor, Charles M. Cros , described a device called the paleophone that was similar to Scott's phonautograph. Although Scott's phonautograph only made images of sound, it was a valuable tool used by later scientists such as Helmholtz, Bell , and Edison . References: Helmholtz, Hermann.

On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Translated by Alexander J. Ellis. London: Longmans, Green, 1875, p. 20. Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville − Dipping Into LightDipping Into Light # Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (April 25, 1817 – April 26, 1879) was a French printer and bookseller who lived in Paris. He invented the earliest known sound recording device, the phonautograph, which was patented in France on March 25, 1857. As a printer by trade, he was able to read accounts of the latest scientific discoveries and became an inventor. Scott de Martinville was interested in recording the sound of human speech in a way similar to that achieved by the then new technology of photography for light and image. He hoped for a form of stenography that could record the whole of a conversation without any omissions.

His earliest interest was in an improved form of stenography and he was the author of several papers on shorthand and a history of the subject (1849). From 1854 he became fascinated in a mechanical means of transcribing vocal sounds. While proofreading some engravings for a physics textbook he came across drawings of auditory anatomy. He sought to mimic the working in a mechanical device, substituting an elastic membrane for the tympanum, a series of levers for the ossicle, which moved a stylus he proposed would press on a paper, wood or glass surface covered in lampblack. On January 26, 1857, he delivered his design in a sealed envelope to the French Academy. On March 25, 1857, he received French patent #17,897/31,470 for the phonautograph. The phonautograph used a horn to collect sound, attached to a diaphragm which vibrated a stiff bristle which inscribed an image on a lamp black coated, hand-cranked cylinder. Scott built several devices with the help of acoustic instrument maker Rudolph Koenig.

Unlike Edison’s later invention of 1877, the phonograph, the phonautograph only created visual images of the sound and did not have the ability to play back its recordings. Scott de Martinville’s device was used only for scientific investigations of sound waves. In 2008, The New York Times reported the playback of a phonautogram recorded on April 9, 1860. The recording was converted from squiggles on paper to a playable digital audio file by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. The phonautogram was one of several deposited by Leon Scott in two archives in Paris and only recently brought to light. The recording, of part of the French folk song Au clair de la lune, was initially played at a speed that produced a reasonable musical tempo, and on that basis it was unveiled as a 10-second recording of the voice of a woman or child. It was later decided that the playback speed had been too fast, and that it was actually a 20-second recording of a man, probably Scott himself, singing the song very slowly.

It is now the earliest known recording of singing in existence, predating, by 28 years, several 1888 Edison wax cylinder phonograph recordings of a massed chorus performing Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt. A phonautogram by Scott containing the opening lines of Torquato Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta, in Italian, has also been found. Recorded around 1860, probably after the recording of Au clair de la lune, this phonautogram is now the earliest known recording of intelligible human speech. Recordings of Scott’s voice made in 1857 have also survived, but they are only unintelligible snippets. It is said that in 1863 a recording was made of Abraham Lincoln’s voice at the White House, using Scott’s phonautograph.A phonautographic tracing of Lincoln’s voice was supposedly included among the artifacts kept by Edison. According to FirstSounds.org, Scott did not travel to the U.S. in the 1860s.

Scott’s phonautograms were selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. EDOUARD-LEON SCOTT DE MARTINVILLE - Forced Exposure PT 1001EP $8.00 IN STOCK Dust-to-Digital proudly inaugurates its vinyl imprint Parlortone with the earliest intelligible recording of the human voice: a historic 20-second version of "Au Clair de la Lune" made in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. This one-sided 45rpm record comes complete with an etched back, a descriptive essay and a reproduction of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's original "Au Clair..." phonautogram. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was born in France in 1817. As a printer by trade, he was able to read accounts of the latest scientific discoveries and became an inventor.

On March 25, 1857, he received French patent #17,897/31,470 for the phonautograph. This device made a visual image of sound waves on a cylinder, but did not play or reproduce any sounds. Scott used a horn to collect sound, a diaphragm at the end of the horn that vibrated from the sound, a stiff brush bristle attached to the diaphragm, and a rotating cylinder covered with lampblack or blackened paper that recorded the wavy lines from the vibrating diaphragm and bristle. Example "No. 5" -- "Au Clair de la Lune" was recorded on April 9, 1860. Scott prepared its recording surface by wrapping a sheet of paper around a cylinder, which he rotated over a smoking lantern to cover with soot. He recorded with two styli -- one driven by the vibrations of a tuning fork, the other driven by a membrane vibrating in sympathy with his voice. He removed the paper from the cylinder and immersed it in an alcohol-based fixative from behind its curtain of noise. He sang purposely into his instrument to reveal the shape of sounds and the frequency of his notes.

In listening to "Au Clair..." we eavesdrop not on a musical performance, but on a scientific experiment -- wafting imperfectly through a window in time. Pioneers - Turntables from Analogue to Digital: History, Technology, Culture Pioneers Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (25 April 1817 – 26 April 1879) was a French printer and bookseller who lived in Paris. He invented the earliest known sound recording device, the phonautograph, which was patented in France on 25 March 1857.[1][2][3] As a printer by trade, he was able to read accounts of the latest scientific discoveries and became an inventor. Scott de Martinville was interested in recording the sound of human speech in a way similar to that achieved by the then new technology of photography for light and image. He hoped for a form of stenography that could record the whole of a conversation without any omissions.

His earliest interest was in an improved form of stenography and he was the author of several papers on shorthand and a history of the subject (1849).[4] Phonautograph From 1854 he became fascinated in a mechanical means of transcribing vocal sounds. While proofreading some engravings for a physics textbook he came across drawings of auditory anatomy. He sought to mimic the working in a mechanical device, substituting an elastic membrane for the tympanum, a series of levers for the ossicle, which moved a stylus he proposed would press on a paper, wood or glass surface covered in lampblack. On 26 January 1857, he delivered his design in a sealed envelope to the French Academy.[4] On 25 March 1857, he received French patent #17,897/31,470 for the phonautograph. The phonautograph used a horn to collect sound, attached to a diaphragm which vibrated a stiff bristle which inscribed an image on a lamp black coated, hand-cranked cylinder. Scott built several devices with the help of acoustic instrument maker Rudolph Koenig.

Unlike Edison’s later invention of 1877, the phonograph, the phonautograph only created visual images of the sound and did not have the ability to play back its recordings. Scott de Martinville’s device was used only for scientific investigations of sound waves. Scott de Martinville managed to sell several phonautographs to scientific laboratories for use in the investigation of sound. It proved useful in the study of vowel sounds and was used by Franciscus Donders, Heinrich Schneebeli and Rene Marage. It also initiated further research into tools able to image sound such as Koenig’s manometric flame.[4] He was not, however, able to profit from his invention and spent the remainder of his life as a librarian and bookseller at 9 Rue Vivienne in Paris.

Scott de Martinville also became interested in the relationship between linguistics, people’s names and their character and published a paper on the subject (1857).[4] Rediscovery of the Au clair de la lune recording In 2008, The New York Times reported the playback of a phonautogram recorded on 9 April 1860.[7] The recording was converted from “squiggles on paper” to a playable digital audio file by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.[7] The phonautogram was one of several deposited by Leon Scott in two archives in Paris and only recently brought to light. The recording, of part of the French folk song Au clair de la lune, was initially played at a speed that produced a reasonable musical tempo, and on that basis it was taken as a 10-second recording of the voice of a woman or child.

It was later decided[by whom?] that the playback speed had been too fast, and that it was actually a 20-second recording of a man, probably Scott himself, singing the song very slowly.[8] It is now the earliest known recording of singing in existence, predating, by 28 years, several 1888 Edison wax cylinder phonograph recordings of a massed chorus performing Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt.[9] A phonautogram by Scott containing the opening lines of Torquato Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta, in Italian, has also been found. Recorded around 1860, probably after the recording of Au clair de la lune, this phonautogram is now the earliest known recording of intelligible human speech.[10] Recordings of Scott’s voice made in 1857 have also survived, but they are only unintelligible snippets. It is said that in 1863 a recording was made of Abraham Lincoln’s voice at the White House, using Scott’s phonautograph.[11] A phonautographic tracing of Lincoln’s voice was supposedly included among the artifacts kept by Edison.

According to FirstSounds.org, Scott did not travel to the U.S. in the 1860s.[12] Scott’s phonautograms were selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.[13] – from Wikipedia Thomas Edison Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey, with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention that first gained him notice was the phonograph in 1877.[31] This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” New Jersey.[2] His first phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder. Despite its limited sound quality and that the recordings could be played only a few times, the phonograph made Edison a celebrity.

Joseph Henry, president of the National Academy of Sciences and one of the most renowned electrical scientists in the US, described Edison as “the most ingenious inventor in this country… or in any other”.[32] In April 1878, Edison travelled to Washington to demonstrate the phonograph before the National Academy of Sciences, Congressmen, Senators and US President Hayes.[33] The Washington Post described Edison as a “genius” and his presentation as “a scene… that will live in history”.[34] Although Edison obtained a patent for the phonograph in 1878,[35] he did little to develop it until Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Tainter produced a phonograph-like device in the 1880s that used wax-coated cardboard cylinders. Emile Berliner Emile Berliner or Emil Berliner (May 20, 1851 – August 3, 1929) was a German-born American inventor. He is best known for developing the disc record gramophone (phonograph in American English).

He founded the Berliner Gramophone Company in 1895, The Gramophone Company in London, England, in 1897, Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover, Germany, in 1898 and Berliner Gram-o-phone Company of Canada in Montreal in 1899 (chartered in 1904). In 1886 Berliner began experimenting with methods of sound recording. He was granted his first patent for what he called the “Gramophone” in 1887. The patent described recording sound using horizontal modulation of a stylus as it traced a line on a rotating cylindrical surface coated with an unresisting opaque material such as lampblack, subsequently fixed with varnish and used to photoengrave a corresponding groove into the surface of a metal playback cylinder. In practice, Berliner opted for the disc format, which made the photoengraving step much less difficult and offered the prospect of making multiple copies of the result by some simpler process such as electrotyping, molding or stamping.

In 1888 Berliner was using a more direct recording method, in which the stylus traced a line through a very thin coating of wax on a zinc disc, which was then etched in acid to convert the line of bared metal into a playable groove. By 1890 a Berliner licensee in Germany was manufacturing a toy Gramophone and five-inch hard rubber discs (stamped-out replicas of etched zinc master discs), but because key US patents were still pending they were sold only in Europe. Berliner meant his Gramophone to be more than a mere toy, and in 1895 he persuaded a group of businessmen to invest $25,000, with which he started the US Berliner Gramophone Company. He began marketing seven-inch records and a more substantial Gramophone, which was, however, still hand-propelled like the smaller toy machine. The difficulty in using early hand-driven Gramophones was getting the turntable to rotate at an acceptably steady speed while playing a disc. Engineer Eldridge R.

Johnson, the owner of a small machine shop in Camden, New Jersey, assisted Berliner in developing a suitable low-cost wind-up spring motor for the Gramophone and became Berliner’s manufacturer. Berliner gave Frank Seaman the exclusive sales rights in the US, but after disagreements Seaman began selling his own version of the Gramophone, as well as unauthorized copies of Berliner’s records, and Berliner was legally barred from selling his own products. The US Berliner Gramophone Company shut down in mid-1900 and Berliner moved to Canada. Following various legal maneuvers, the Victor Talking Machine Company was officially founded by Eldridge Johnson in 1901 and the trade name “Gramophone” was completely and permanently abandoned in the US, although its use continued elsewhere. The Berliner Gramophone Co. of Canada was chartered on 8 April 1904 and reorganized as the Berliner Gramophone Co. in 1909.

1860 'Phonautograph' Is Earliest Known Recording : NPR 1860 'Phonautograph' Is Earliest Known Recording Embed Embed 1860 'Phonautograph' Is Earliest Known Recording 1860 'Phonautograph' Is Earliest Known Recording Embed Embed Email April 4, 200810:00 AM ET Audio historians have found a sound recording that predates Edison's phonograph by nearly 20 years. The "phonautograph" was patented in 1857 by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville; the device recorded images from sounds, tracing squiggles in black soot coating a surface. IRA FLATOW, host: You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Up next, a new finding that may mean Thomas Edison has been ousted as the Father of recorded sound or at least that he has to share the honors. A team of audio historians recently found recordings that predate Edison by about 20 years. They were made by a French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott on a machine called a phonautograph - and phono-autograph.

Until last month, they were filed away, having never been heard, with Scott's papers there in a Paris patent office and the French Academy of Sciences. We're joined now by one of the members of the research team, here to tell the story of finding those recordings and restoring them. And if you hang with us, we're going to hear the oldest recorded sound. We'll listen to it and get Scott's take on what Edison accomplished several years later. And what it was like to be the first person to listen to these recordings? So if you like to give us a call, our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. And you can always surf over to our Web site at sciencefriday.com and join avatars in "Second Life." Patrick Feaster is a phonograph historian and instructor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University in Bloomington. He joins us today from the studios of WFIU in Bloomington. Welcome to the program, Dr. Feaster, especially during March Madness. I know how hard it is to pull yourself away there in Indiana. Mr.

PATRICK FEASTER (Audio Historian; Assistant Instructor, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University): Well, I didn't have to struggle my way over here, but it's a pleasure to be here. (Soundbite of laughter) FLATOW: Let's talk about it. Is this - is it the oldest known what, recording, song, sound, what is it? Mr. FEASTER: Well, it's the first of a number of things. It's the earliest recognizable recording of the human voice, the earliest recording of a vocal musical performance, the oldest recognizable snippet of sound in any recognizable language. So, it's a lot of firsts. FLATOW: How come we don't hear - we never heard of this guy here, at least in the States. Mr. FESTER: Well, I think any detailed history of sound recording does mention Leon Scott, but certainly not as prominently as they mention Edison. FLATOW: He was an 800-pound gorilla in a good sense. I mean, he was a big, you know, he was the driving force in audio technology. Mr. FESTER: Leon Scott or Edison?

FLATOW: Edison, here in this country. Mr. FEASTER: Oh, oh, sure. FLATOW: Yeah. Mr. FESTER: Edison was the first person to really succeed in recording a sound from the atmosphere and then playing it back. That was his goal from the beginning. He was hoping he could record sounds and ideally played them back over a telephone. That was his first idea. But then, all sorts of other applications turned up later on. FLATOW: So he wanted to make a product out of this stuff. Mr. FESTER: That's right. He was hoping this would be used by businessman, primarily. You could record incoming phone messages. You can record business dictation, all kinds of things like that. And then, it's kind of a side issue, well, capture all the great performances of all time for posterity. FLATOW: And Scott had a different goal. Mr. FESTER: Yeah. Thomas Edison was hoping to record sound so he could play it back. By contrast, Leon Scott wanted to get sounds down on paper where he could look at them and study them. It wasn't that he didn't know how to play them back.

It's just he never really thought of that as something that was worth trying to do. FLATOW: Why? What did you do - I'm trying to understand the sense of his sense of what he was trying to do by looking at waves on a sheet of paper, what the feelings of science community in France were that time. What was his gist here? Mr. FESTER: Well, first of all, in terms of what we're talking about here visually, anybody who's ever used audio editing software should have a pretty good idea of what we're talking about here, that kind of wavy line that you see on your screen that somehow corresponds to a sound file that you're working with. Now, Leon Scott was professionally a typesetter. He set the type for books. He'd written a history of shorthand writing, not long before he got this idea. So he was really interested in ways of getting speech down on paper. He thought what he had invented was the ultimate speech-to-text machine. (Soundbite of laughter) FLATOW: Well, that's kind of interesting. So, he really was not, as you say, he was not - someone else would figure out how to play it back later on if they wanted to.

That was not his job. Mr. FESTER: No. He was hoping people would learn to read those squiggles and not just getting the words out of them. He saw that this invention, which is really kind of an artificial ear, that was his idea - was to build an artificial ear. That it would record not just the words, like stenography or shorthand, but you get all these special details, anything that made a musical performance great or a great speech great. FLATOW: Now, tell us how you've found them and what the motivation of your team was, if you did not know they existed? Mr. FESTER: Well, we knew that phonautograms were out there. I'd seen at least one photocopy and so we set out to find the original of that. Get a high-quality scan, and just in the process of haunting that one down, we found a second one and those were the first two that we actually tried to play back. And although we were astonished that it worked - people had been talking about doing this for a number of years. Although we got some sounds out of those, they weren't quite what we were hoping for.

FLATOW: Well, we actually have recordings of those, so you can - let's play them and people can see how difficult it was to hear what they sound like. Let's play the first one and you'll tell us what we were listening to. (Soundbite of phonautograph recording) (Soundbite of laughter) FLATOW: It sounds like it's broken. Dr. FEASTER: Well, it doesn't sound like a great deal. What you just heard was a little - actually two little snippets from a sound recording that Leon Scott deposited with the French patent office in… FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Dr. FEASTER: …1857. So, we know that this dates back at least to March of 1857. FLATOW: Do we know what it is that he was trying to... Dr. FEASTER: Well, he writes on this - yeah, he writes on a sheet that this is a phonautogram - that was his word for these recordings - a phonautogram of the human voice at a distance.

Now, what that means is just that someone is standing in front some kind of a funnel and speaking, shouting, singing - we don't know doing what - into that funnel. It vibrates a little membrane, and that wiggles a stylus that scratches this wavy line on a sheet of paper. FLATOW: All right, now we have another one that - you say, as you say, the second one from 1859. Let's listen to it. (Soundbite of phonautograph recording) FLATOW: That's a pretty pure tone. Dr. FEASTER: Right. Now, what you're hearing there is a recording we believe was made actually by the vibrations of the tuning fork directly. That is we're not picking something up with the membrane, something that's gone through the air. This is just the actual tuning fork vibrating and drawing a wiggly line. FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Dr. FEASTER: So this is, we figure, the oldest, recovered sound that really sounds like something. I mean, you can tell it sounds like a tuning fork, right? FLATOW: Now, how did you get off that paper?

I mean, there was no phonograph needle here, was there? Dr. FEASTER: Right. Well, this is really due to the work of Carl Haber and Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They've been working on developing optical message for playing back early sound recordings on delicate media such as, you know, wax phonograph cylinders and so on. The idea being that since nothing is touching the groove except light, there's no wear and tear on the original as there would be if you try to use a traditional stylus or a needle. So adapting that technology to play back a wavy line on a piece of paper was really pretty straight forward. In fact, it may have been simpler because we're just dealing with two dimensions. FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Dr. FEASTER: There's no depth as you have with a record groove. FLATOW: So it's like shining a laser beam and letting it trace the sound recording on the paper. Dr. FEASTER: Right. FLATOW: Yeah. All right, let's go now to the next clip from 1859. Keep going and tell us the progression that we're going to hear now. Dr.

FEASTER: Okay, the next clip, I believe, is from 1860, right? FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Let's play that and tell us what were listening to? Dr. FEASTER: Okay. (Soundbite of phonautograph recording) FLATOW: Now, that's the one that would - made all the news last week. Dr. FEASTER: That's right. That was the one that gave us goose bumps when we heard it. As I said, we've been a little disappointed with the first two phonautograms we heard. But we knew from some of Scott's writings that he had deposited some other recordings with the French Academy of Sciences. So as soon as we found that out, David Giovannoni, who is also a member of FirstSounds, immediately made arrangements to get scans of anything that Leon Scott had deposited there. We got that on March 1st, just to give a sense for how quickly this has all happened. He opened those files up, looked at them, and among other things there were Scott's very first experiments there from 1853, 1854. Those looked totally unplayable.

But towards the end, there were all of these beautiful phonautograms. He'd looked at those, immediately recognized these were the clearest, best recordings we've seen yet. And then, I started looking at the inscriptions on them, and that's when we got even more excited, because we realized that what were dealing with here are recordings of songs, vocal scales, recitations. So, not just the tuning fork. I mean, this is going to be something really interesting to listen to. FLATOW: Yeah. And you decided that by deciphering it, it was all "Clair de Lune," right? Dr. FEASTER: They actually wrote out "Clair de Lune" at the bottom of the sheet and dated it in April 1860, so that's how we knew, not only what it was... FLATOW: Right. Dr. FEASTER: …but the actual date it was recorded. FLATOW: Well, because it's so hard to hear it from the original sound recording, we're going to play a more modern recording version of it. And then we'll play the sound recording, and you'll be able to actually decipher it out.

So let's listen to a modern version of that. (Soundbite of music) Unidentified Man: (Singing in foreign language) (Soundbite of phonautograph recording) FLATOW: That's quite obvious in that comparison, isn't it? Dr. FEASTER: Well, I guess we've made a few advances in audio technology in the last 150 years as well. (Soundbite of laughter) FLATOW: So are there other treasures out there waiting, do you think? Dr. FEASTER: We believe there are. There are other Scott phonautograms that were present with this one that we have not yet played back. We're very much looking forward to doing that. I should mention that everything that we've recovered so far, you can hear online at firstsounds.org, including a recording made by Thomas Edison in 1878 using the phonautograph. But we certainly hope - and these are really just the first of many primeval sounds we'll be able to recover. FLATOW: Was this initially the first recording recognizable as a song? I mean, it was done, I imagine, with a hand-cranked machine so the speed must have been off, right? Dr.

FEASTER: Right. When it first came straight off the sheet, it sounded very irregular. We've got a hand-cranked machine, so when you try to play it back at a constant speed you get something that sounds like errr, yerr. Fortunately for us, Leon Scott thought of that, so alongside the vocal track, he had a tuning fork vibrating as well, much like the trace that you heard from 1859 a little bit ago. And the nice thing about a tuning fork is you know exactly how many times it vibrates in a second to minutes and so forth. So, we were able to go along and adjust that tuning fork trace to a constant speed, so it was a constant 500 Hertz... FLATOW: Wow, that's genius. Dr. FEASTER: …and, yeah, so the vocal track we had lined up as a stereo file with the tuning fork. So, when we adjusted the tuning fork, the vocal track just sprang into synch with it, and then we had what you hear today. Not quite what you had today. That still has had thumps, pops, clicks and so forth. Richard Martin at Archeophone Records did that piece of the work.

But… FLATOW: Let me just jump in and remind everybody that this is TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. Audio done lot of different ways these days. Patrick Feaster is talking about the history of this phonautograph. Now, as we say in New York, didn't he think he was robbed? I was robbed by Edison getting all that credit. Dr. FEASTER: He thought that Edison was getting undue credit at his expense. Of course, he lived to see Edison's phonograph, not much longer after that. He died in 1879. But when Edison was getting all of this credit for recording sound and then playing it back, he — first of all, he felt that he was really responsible for the big breakthrough, but he also felt that Edison was off the mark. After all, he's just playing back sound. You still can't look at it on the page and make sense of it. So he thought Edison not only had ripped off his idea but was doing something nonsensical with it. FLATOW: It's almost to me like the history of the telephone, where they -businesspeople - so what do you want to do that for?

It's just a toy, you know? But that turned out to be the more useful. And now, we're seeing the phonograph being the more useful — used product. Dr. FEASTER: Right. And Leon Scott wasn't alone here. There were other people who told Edison. You know, this is great, Tom. We could hear the sound back, but really what you need is some way of writing it down on a piece of paper so we can see it… FLATOW: Yeah. And… Dr. FEASTER: …and make sense of it. FLATOW: And the fax machine had already been invented, or was being invented around a little later - the pantelegraph would be coming a few years later then. Dr. FEASTER: Mm-hmm. But in terms of reproducing these sounds — Leon Scott, it just was not part of his… FLATOW: Yeah. Dr. FEASTER: …mental math. It would be a little bit like saying, okay, that's great, you got a seismograph, you can record earthquakes, but don't you really want to play them back? FLATOW: And let's just talk about France in that period of history.

That really was a tremendous research and development country with all kinds of things were going on there. Not only was there the controversy now about the phonograph, there's also with filmmaking with Edison. Dr. FEASTER: Mm-hmm. Sure. That comes a little bit later. But at that time, there was an awful lot of international collaboration. People were borrowing ideas, building on each other's ideas right and left. And I really think and hope that there is plenty of credit to go around. FLATOW: So… Dr. FEASTER: Certainly France was at the forefront. FLATOW: Now, let's talk about then where Scott should rightfully be placed. Should we consider him to be the father of recorded sound? Dr. FEASTER: I'd say that that title does belong to him - the father of recorded sound. We might still call Edison the father of reproduced sound. I think that would be fair. FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And so where do you go from there - from here? Are you going to go look back into those archives again for some more stuff? Dr. FEASTER: Well, we're sure hoping to.

We think this is probably about as early as we can get, but there's a lot of other things in there that — in between 1860 and later years that we're still hoping to get. FLATOW: Do you have any idea who that person singing might have been? Dr. FEASTER: Well, there's been some speculation about that. David Giovannoni has suggested that he would like to think it might be Leon Scott's daughter. We know that he had a 15-year-old daughter at the time he made that recording. And it would make sense. He's looking for someone to sing a song into his phonautograph. She was probably sitting around the house. That could be, but really we don't know. It's truly guesswork for right now. FLATOW: And what was your - just to get on the records here, somebody who makes a great discovery, you know, you have a-ha moment. How did you know, when did you know something really big had been found? And what were you thinking or feeling? Dr. FEASTER: Well, for me, I can't speak for other people on this project. I'm sure they all had a-ha moments as well.

But, for me, it was sitting there at my computer at about 5 o'clock in the morning having finally finished up those speed adjustments I was telling you about so we could finally actually hear the pitch of the song and so forth. So, I'm a sound recording historian, so hearing a voice from 100 years ago is no real surprise for me. But sitting there, I was just kind of stunned to be thinking, now I'm suddenly at last listening to a performance of vocal music made in France before the American Civil War. That was just a stunning thing, feeling like a ghost is trying to sing to me through that static. FLATOW: Well, I want to wish you - I want to congratulate you, first, and wish you great success. And hopefully when you discover more stuff, you'll come back on SCIENCE FRIDAY and play it for us. Dr. FEASTER: Well, hope I can look forward to that. FLATOW: And maybe we'll do a whole history of sound recording. It could be a very interesting program. Dr. FEASTER: I'd be interested. FLATOW: All right. We have your phone number. (Soundbite of laughter) Dr.

FEASTER: Okay. FLATOW: Patrick Feaster, phonautograph historian and instructor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University in Bloomington. Thanks for taking time to be with us today. Dr. FEASTER: Thank you. FLATOW: You're welcome. Copyright © 2008 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc. , an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Sound Recording Predates Edison Phonograph Sound Recording Predates Edison Phonograph Embed Embed De Martinville, Edouard-leon Scott: Au Clair De La Lune | Midheaven Mailorder Au Clair De La Lune Parlortone Dust-to-Digital proudly inaugurates its vinyl imprint Parlortone with the earliest intelligible recording of the human voice: a historic 20-second version of "Au Clair de la Lune" made in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. This one-sided 45rpm record comes complete with an etched back, a descriptive essay and a reproduction of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's original "Au Clair..." phonautogram. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was born in France in 1817. As a printer by trade, he was able to read accounts of the latest scientific discoveries and became an inventor. On March 25, 1857, he received French patent #17,897/31,470 for the phonautograph. This device made a visual image of sound waves on a cylinder, but did not play or reproduce any sounds.

Scott used a horn to collect sound, a diaphragm at the end of the horn that vibrated from the sound, a stiff brush bristle attached to the diaphragm, and a rotating cylinder covered with lampblack or blackened paper that recorded the wavy lines from the vibrating diaphragm and bristle. Example "No. 5" - Au Clair de la Lune" was recorded on April 9, 1860. Scott prepared its recording surface by wrapping a sheet of paper around a cylinder, which he rotated over a smoking lantern to cover with soot. He recorded with two styli—one driven by the vibrations of a tuning fork, the other driven by a membrane vibrating in sympathy with his voice. He removed the paper from the cylinder and immersed it in an alcohol-based fixative from behind its curtain of noise. He sang purposely into his instrument to reveal the shape of sounds and the frequency of his notes. In listening to "Au Clair..." we eavesdrop not on a musical performance, but on a scientific experiment—wafting imperfectly through a window in time.

Related Items Phonautogram - Thomas Edison - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville - The New York Times The New York Times Arts |Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison Search Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison By JODY ROSEN Continue reading the main story For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison. Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered. Continue reading the main story But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used 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.

The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers. Advertisement Continue reading the main story David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back. Photo The audio historian David Giovannoni with a recently discovered phonautogram that is among the earliest sound recordings. Credit Isabelle Trocheris Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated. “We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr.

Giovannoni said. But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk. The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr. Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on the Archeophone album “Actionable Offenses,” a collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Mr. Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the world’s oldest recorded sounds, Mr. Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott’s phonautograms. Historians have long been aware of Scott’s work.

But the American researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search for Scott’s phonautograms or attempt to play them back. In December Mr. Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr. Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings. A trail of clues, including a cryptic reference in Scott’s writings to phonautogram deposits made at “the Academy,” led the researchers to another Paris institution, the French Academy of Sciences, where several more of Scott’s recordings were stored. Mr. Giovannoni said that his eureka moment came when he laid eyes on the April 1860 phonautogram, an immaculately preserved sheet of rag paper 9 inches by 25 inches. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “It was pristine,” Mr. Giovannoni said.

“The sound waves were remarkably clear and clean.” His scans were sent to the Lawrence Berkeley lab, where they were converted into sound by the scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. They used a technology developed several years ago in collaboration with the Library of Congress, in which high-resolution “maps” of grooved records are played on a computer using a digital stylus. The 1860 phonautogram was separated into 16 tracks, which Mr. Giovannoni, Mr. Feaster and Mr. Martin meticulously stitched back together, making adjustments for variations in the speed of Scott’s hand-cranked recording. Photo The 19th-century phonautograph, which captured sounds visually but did not play them back, has yielded a discovery with help from modern technology. Credit Courtesy of David Giovannoni Listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording made before the idea of audio playback was even imagined.

“There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott, because he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking at it,” said Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and the author of “The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.” Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means.” Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own.

There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott’s work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound. “Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery,” Mr. Giovannoni said. Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., praised the discovery as a “tremendous achievement,” but called Edison’s phonograph a more significant technological feat. “What made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to reproduce sound and he succeeded,” Mr. Israel said. But history is finally catching up with Scott. Mr. Sterne, the McGill professor, said: “We are in a period that is more similar to the 1860s than the 1880s. With computers, there is an unprecedented visualization of sound.” The acclaim Scott sought may turn out to have been assured by the very sonic reproduction he disdained. And it took a group of American researchers to rescue Scott’s work from the musty vaults of his home city. In his memoir, Scott scorned his American rival Edison and made brazen appeals to French nationalism.

“What are the rights of the discoverer versus the improver?” he wrote less than a year before his death in 1879. “Come, Parisians, don’t let them take our prize.” A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Pre-Edison 'phonautogram' drew pictures of sound waves, and they’ve made a copy Pre-Edison 'phonautogram' drew pictures of sound waves, and they’ve made a copy By Paul Wallis Mar 28, 2008 in Technology Almost twenty years before Edison, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made a recording device which could create a visual record of sound waves. Some reverse engineering has succeeded in getting 10 seconds of “Claire De Lune”. Found in a Paris archive, the recording survived the World Wars and nearly 150 years. Not surprising, because it’s an almost unknown form of technology, which would have required a leap of logic as well as some 21st century technology to translate into sound… or another phonautogram.

The phonautogram recorded the sounds on paper blackened by oil lamp smoke. Scott de Martinville’s idea was to record human speech. He was ahead of his time in more ways than one. Visual representation of sound, let alone accurate depiction of it, is no minor achievement. Electronic recording and its predecessors have all been based on Edison’s version. Yet, as the New York Times describes, this audio fingerprint translates into a real song, sung by a real person: “…But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used 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. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.” The recording has sound blotches, and the voice sounds either female or a child. You can hear sound, but it's not very clear, and the voice isn't really amplified at all. It'd be a natural voice volume that the phonautogram recorded. One way or another, it has the distinction of being the earliest known recording ever reproduced.

(Look out for the other recording, a 1931 version of Claire De Lune. Whoever the singer is, she can hit a forte which can come as a shock to your speakers.) Apparently earlier versions of the phonautogram weren’t properly calibrated, and they technique used for Claire De Lune just got “squawks”. The story of the finding of the phonautogram is naturally in the middle of the NYT article. Try this for a progression of events: “In December Mr. Giovannoni (lead US researcher) and a research assistant traveled to a patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr. Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings.” It’d be interesting to know what else has been hanging around being ignored for centuries in patent offices, or will be. More inventions are patented on the average day in the US than in the world at that time. Not many of them survive, commercially.

The US Patent Office could have the Fountain of Youth, and it'd be perfectly safe there. “A trail of clues, including a cryptic reference in Scott’s writings to phonautogram deposits made at “the Academy,” led the researchers to another Paris institution, the French Academy of Sciences, where several more of Scott’s recordings were stored. Mr. Giovannoni said that his eureka moment came when he laid eyes on the April 1860 phonautogram, an immaculately preserved sheet of rag paper 9 inches by 25 inches.” Scott de Martinville complained in his memoirs about Edison stealing his idea, but that doesn’t stack up too well against a totally different technology. He did come up with one interesting comment about the word “phonograph”, it means, literally, “sound writing”, or as he calls it, “writing speech”. There are actual applications for versions of the phonautogram in any visual medium. If you can transcribe music into parts of a painting, and come up with a way of playing them back, say a laser like DVDs use, and the write encoding, you could actually paint a symphony. That raises the risk of symphonic modern art, but it could be interesting, anyway.

The other problem is it could create hybrid musicians and visual artists, and that would be terrible. Think of the tantrums. Then there’s the potential for kitsch. You could paint every room in the house with a different song, or even a playlist. You could have “This Ole House” for the front door. “The Impossible Dream” for the bathroom. “Climb Every Mountain” for the laundry. “La Cucaracha” for the kitchen. The complete unexpurgated works of Alvin and the Chipmunks for the bedroom. “Swan Lake” for those dramatic moments in the dining room. You could move into a really annoying neighborhood and stick up a statue of Bob Marley, and play everything he ever did with your statue. Not all bad.

Question: What device did French inventor douard-Lon Scott de Martinville patent in 1857?
Answer: Phonautograph