Midnight Oil’s First Recording (1860)
It’s a recording that predates Thomas Edison’s inventions, and even predates the idea of playback itself.
In 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter who dabbled in inventions and had no grand plans, came up with a device that created squiggles on paper from sounds that were shouted or sung into a barrel. These “phonautograph” recordings had been alluded to before recently, but it took a group of scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley laboratories in California to decipher the scrolls and convert them back into something audible, which was beyond what Scott had ever envisioned for his little machine:
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.
The recording itself is amazingly easy to hear, considering the manner in which it was recorded and the fact that it’s a hundred and forty-seven freaking years old. It predates Edison’s first tinfoil records by almost thirty years. (To be fair, Edison was able to play back his recordings, which if you want to get technical is where the whole file sharing mess really started. But neither achievement, in my mind, diminishes the other.)
Just hearing this thing, all ten seconds of “Au Claire de Lune,” is pretty damned amazing.
[Thanks, Vidiot, for finding it.]
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