A BRIEF TIMELINE OF RECORDED SOUND

One of the coolest pieces of vintage equipment we’ve ever sold here at SpenCertified is the Edison Model B Phonograph, which was a beautiful antique music player from the 1900s. To own something like this is to own a piece of history. After all, Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, produced the very first sound recording. …Right?

Wrong! While his invention was the first to play back a recording, the foundation for sound recording actually predated Edison by about 20 years. So let’s have some fun and take a look back in time through sound recordings!

1857

Nearly 170 years ago, sound recording got its start with the “phonautograph.” This device was invented by the Frenchman Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857. Similar to today’s seismograph, the phonautograph could visually capture sound waves.

Like all early sound recordings, it worked through the use of vibration. Audio was funneled through its large horn into a delicate membrane. This membrane vibrated when sound waves hit it, which caused an attached stylus to trace those vibrations onto paper coated in soot. And though the sound could not be played back, you could see the visual waveforms that the sound made. Scott used this to study the science of sound.

1860

Three years later, Scott used his phonautograph to make a recording of the French song “Au Clair de la Lune.” It was a voice recording of someone, possibly himself, singing the old folk song. This is significant because it’s the earliest recognizable record of the human voice we still have. Despite its fragility, these waveforms on paper were kept safe in archives for almost 150 years.

Then, in 2008, scientists and audio historians did one of the coolest things imaginable: they figured out how to scan and digitally interpret those lines on paper to recreate the audio. Is the quality scratchy and rather poor? Yes. But if you’ve heard the song before, you would absolutely be able to recognize this recording as it. Incredibly, thanks to firstsounds.org, you can actually listen to the recording here.

1877

Twenty years after Scott’s phonautograph came the birth of Thomas Edison’s phonograph. Though it followed the groundwork laid out by Scott’s invention, Edison’s 1877 phonograph did what Scott’s couldn’t: it played back sound.

Working similarly to the phonautograph, the phonograph used a diaphragm and stylus to capture sound vibrations when someone spoke into a mouthpiece. The diaphragm would vibrate, thus etching the grooves of each soundwave onto a rotating cylinder; this cylinder was covered first in tinfoil, then later in wax.

When the stylus ran back over these grooves, the vibrations traveled back up through the diaphragm, recreating the original sound.

Fun Fact! Did you know that Edison’s first audio recording was “Mary Had a Little Lamb”?

IN SUMMARY

While the moment history found its voice is often credited to Thomas Edison, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville set the stage for him. However, both the phonautograph and the phonograph are remarkable pieces of audio history, paving the way for talking movies and music the way we know it today.

Thanks for reading! Have a great day!