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Move over Edison — the French recorded sound first
It’s no-one’s idea of great music but the ghostly warbling of a French folk song nearly 148 years ago comprises the oldest recording of the human voice, France’s Academy of Sciences says.
The 10-second recording was made by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on April 9 1860. It was made a whole 17 years before Thomas Edison made his historic message, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a phonograph, which is the landmark event in the history of recorded sound.
Scott de Martinville’s gadget, a “phonautograph” (shown left), was a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke from an oil lamp. Unlike Edison, whose great achievement was to not only record but also play back the recording, Scott de Martinville was never able to hear what was traced on the smoked paper.
Listen to the track here:
(If you can’t hear the sound you can get the mp3 file directly from here)
Fri 28-Mar-08 | Posted in: History, Created in France
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