Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

Tree131 writes "The New York Times is reporting that sound recordings pre-dating Edison's made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, were discovered by American audio historians at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. The archives are on paper and were meant for recording but not playback. Researchers used a high quality scan of the recording and an electronic needle to play back the sounds recorded 150 years ago. 'For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.'"

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Ethanol-fueled]

I guess Tesla/Westinghouse would be analogous to the Open source movement [wikipedia.org], then. Note that, in the end, AC prevailed. Go Tesla!

Re:Well?

[mistapotta]

From TFA: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1860v2.mp3 [nytimes.com]
For comparison, the same song sung in 1931: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1931.mp3 [nytimes.com]

Re:Flight?

[underpants_gnome]

I don't know about "before" the Wright Brothers, but there is the well known case of Santos' Dumont flight in Paris. The key difference to the Wright Flyer was the take-off process. His plane (the 14 Bis) had an engine, or in other words, was self-powered and could sustain flight. That's why many people (outside the US of course =P) consider Santos Dumont's invention the "first real airplane".

Re:How big a cut does the **AA get??

[Mr. Slippery]

probably why there is no sound clip with the story....

Eh? RTFA. MP3 is provided. For those too lazy, here: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1860v2.mp3 [nytimes.com]

It's noisy as hell but recognizably a human voice.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[MrKevvy]

I am surprised that your list doesn't contain Edwin Howard Armstrong [wikipedia.org]. I suggest the book "Man of High Fidelity" if you can find it. Like Tesla, he was a brilliant electrical engineer, inventing many of the circuits essential to radio (and he invented FM) but others stole the credit and patents from him throughout his life, culminating in his suicide in 1954.

Re:Revisionist History

[Oligonicella]

You're being pedantic. Even your own link says his had "an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable." In shorter terms, it worked in a utilitarian way. He may not be the inventor of the incandescent apparatus, but he's the inventor of the light bulb.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[wattrlz]

It should also be noted that the intention of, "this Frenchman" was not to play back his recordings, but to develop an automatic method of transcribing speech. TFA states:

In a self-published memoir in 1878, [Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville] railed against Edison for "appropriating" his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but "writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means."

Re:Awesome

[Scrameustache]

I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back. I think it's just spectacular that we are able to do so 150 years later.

But give credit where it's due... Edison not only transferred sound to physical media - he played it back too.

The earliest known invention of a phonographic recording device was the phonautograph, invented by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and patented on March 25, 1857. It could transcribe sound to a visible medium, but had no means to play back the sound after it was recorded.

It was a scientific device, meant to study sound waves.

Edison modified it for playback, and made his fortune. [time passed] Then he electrocuted an elephant [wikipedia.org] to FUD alternating current technology.
He was the Bill Gates of the 19th/20th century. Same morals, same amount of inventing.

Re:Not quite the same.

[TripMaster Monkey]

Why is it not the same? It *was* intended for playback, but he realized that technology was far beyond him.

Um, no, it wasn't. He never intended to play back the recording.

As it says in TFA, he was simply hoping to put down a recording that someone would later be able to decipher, which is exactly what happened.

TFA says nothing of the sort. In fact, TFA makes it clear that Scott considered Edison's work a bastardization of his own.

From TFA:

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. ...
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. ...
Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for "appropriating" his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but "writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means."

Re:Flight?

[camperdave]

The Montgolfier Brothers [wikipedia.org] took to the air almost a full century before the Wright brothers were even born. Mind you, that was in a hot air balloon.

Re:Flight?

[superdave80]

"The key difference to the Wright Flyer was the take-off process. His plane (the 14 Bis) had an engine"

Um, so what are the propellers in this picture attached to? http://www.old-picture.com/wright-brothers/pictures/Wright-Brothers-Airplane-001.jpg [old-picture.com]

And his flight was three years after the Wright Brothers. (1903 vs. 1906) Dumont supporters cling to the fact that the Wright Brothers had a headwind at takeoff to justify their claim that he, and not the Wright Brothers, was the first to fly a real airplane. Pretty weak argument if you ask me.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[mtgarden]

How so? I just finished reading Edison and the Electric Chair. I did not know much about Edison or Westinghouse (and Tesla only made brief appearances).

A major point that I came away with was this: Edison was a bit unethical; Westinghouse made Edison look saintly. Edison would manipulate public opinion, but Westinghouse lied, bribed and disregarded the public to make headway against Edison Electric.

Both men did great things and invented useful technology. Neither was a shining example of ethics. But, lets remember that Edison was not accused of bribing the entire New York State Legislature or NYC officials or just about everyone in sight. Nor did Edison disregard the safety of people. Westinghouse blew off safety concerns and consequently many people died.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[RDW]

'Translation: crystallizing materials (cooling molten metals, cooling glasses, drying out of sugars and salts, all sorts of things you can picture remaining from an ancient environment) can leave traces of acoustic vibrations that were passing through them when they were cooling in their crystal structure. Meaning that we could potentially recover them. I don't know how widely applicable this technique is, but it certainly seems possible.'

Interestingly, recovery of sounds 'recorded' by various accidental mechanisms (e.g. in the grooves of a clay pot) has been the subject of semi-serious speculation, a well-known hoax, several SF stories, an episode of the X-files, and even some published but highly dubious research:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.html [upenn.edu]

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Rei]

Mythbusters throughly busted the clay pot approach, though. If there was any signal to begin with, it gets completely lost in the noise of the grainy surface.