Listen to this fine piece of music, will ya? That right there is the earliest recording that still survives today. It was just revealed and written up in SCIENCE NEWS.
WASHINGTON — Inscribed on soot-blackened paper, the muffled sounds from more than 150 years ago play back like the “wa wa” of an unseen teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. It would be impossible to know that someone was playing the coronet and guitar, although other fragments, from a dramatic speech from Shakespeare’s Othello, might be discerned if you knew the lines by heart in French.
Yet these sound bites and other snippets, unveiled May 29 by historians at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, are the earliest known recordings. A bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by smoke from an oil lamp date from 1857. That’s 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph.
Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville never intended for the soot-lined imprint of the sound waves to be played back, the historians reported. But the inventor hoped the visual patterns of the sound waves he had recorded using a hornlike device with the stylus attached resembling an artificial ear — called a phonautograph — might one day be read like sheet music to recreate a singer’s voice or the timbre of a musical instrument.
So, it was Scott’s phonautograms that came twenty years before Edison’s phonograph records. Aha! it was the French! How come history can get so twisted sometimes? Like how we think Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and movable type, when, in fact, the Chinese had already been employing presses for seven centuries and movable type for four centuries. So it goes.
In 1878, some two decades after his invention, Léon Scott was devastated when Thomas Edison received accolades from around the world for the invention of the phonograph. “Come Parisians, don’t let them take our prize,” Léon Scott exhorted in a memoir. “I beseech all stout-hearted men and I thank God some still remain to proclaim my name in this matter. For I am getting old, the father of two sons, and all I can leave them is my good name.”