first sounds

Several years ago I heard about this on some NPR show -- "this" being the fact that sound had in fact been recorded about 2 decades before Edison. The feat was accomplished by a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His machine, the phonautograph, for making this happen looked like this:


In a way this did "record" sound: but it did so only for the purposes of examining how it looked (it recorded sound onto paper). That is Édouard never seemed interested in hearing the sound reproduced. But in modern times that information can be used to turn the visible marking of a wave back into sound. If you use any audio editing software you'll know that if you zoom in close enough you get to see the actual wave form of the sound.

So, anyway, if any of the above seems interesting to you please check out FirstSounds.org where there is audio of the first recording plus a lot of .pdf files of original documents. Also midway (or so) down the home page is a short very informative video.