Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison 314
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.'"
Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
But give credit where it's due... Edison not only transferred sound to physical media - he played it back too.
Not quite the same. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Insightful)
The inventer of this device never indended it for playback. What good is a recording that can't be played back?
I don't know of any useless thing Microsoft has picked up and made useful. I also don't see anywhere that it says Edison ever heard of this guy.
Also, Edison was already not the father of modern sound recording. Modern sound recordings are digital.
-mcgrew
So what (Score:4, Insightful)
So what if Edison didn't make the first recording. He is the guy that ran with the ball and scored the touchdown.
Give props where they are due. Have this, 2 decade earlier guy, be a footnote.
Re:Not quite the same. (Score:4, Insightful)
edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his time (Score:5, Insightful)
and i'm not really denigrating edison. i am in fact saying that the cult of whomever invents something is overhyped. a lot of what is important in this world is producing the thing, popularizing it, putting it in the hands of consumers, not just dreaming the damn thing up. that's actually pretty easy. the light bulb was invented individually by half a dozen different guys in the 19th century. but the lion's share of the credit goes to edison. why? because he actually followed up and put the dang thing in the hand's of consumers. and that matters. some may think it is unfair, but who said life was fair? go study the farnsworth and rca and the invention of the television if you want a lesson on invetion and fairness and reality
i had a 32M rio pmp300 MP3 player in 1998, many years before an iPod was a twinkle in steve job's eye. but the mass of western industrial consumers didn't take portable mp3 players that seriously until steve jobs gave them something gleaming and sexy. such is the way of the world
there is more to progress than just invention. there is also streamlining for mass production, financing, distributing, marketing, etc. and those jobs (no pun intended) are not as sexy, but they oftentimes decide the tempo of progress more than some lonely guy tinkering somewhere. and, perhaps even more importantly, they decide immortality: whose name gets stuck in the history books next to an invention. and they also decide who gets the billions in riches from that invention too
believe me, in 2108, when someone wikiyahoogoogle's "mp3 player" on their visor computer, they won't see a rio pmp300. they will see steve job's cryogenically frozen head with a perfect gleaming iPodWhite(tm) smile
Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's wrong with saying "Scott devised a way to record but not play back while Edison devised both" in the history books?
Furthermore, many accounts I've read claim that Leibniz beat Newton to calculus. I wasn't there so I can't say but I still think his name should be mentioned more than it is. Especially since some accounts give Leibniz credit with both the first and second (hence the term Leibniz Integral Rule [wikipedia.org]) fundamental theories of calculus even if his logic to find them was flawed.
The fact that you side step Einstein's efforts to overlook quantum theory by pointing out an amazing discovery by him is hilarious. Should I try to circumvent the calculus discussion by pointing out Leibniz's contributions to philosophy?
Frankly, I am dumbfounded why it's difficult to list the multiple peoples it takes to make a brilliant discovery and even further dumbfounded when a man of science attempts to take credit for or repress someone's work.
Re:Not quite the same. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd say Edison clearly retains the title for playback and the Martinville clearly holds the new title for recording.
It's okay, bruised Americans... you still hold the more important title.
Re:Uh, pointless... (Score:3, Insightful)
What the Hell Happened to the French? (Score:5, Insightful)
But then it all hit the wall, apparently sometime in the late 1800s. Was it the Franco-Prussian War? Did they just get distracted by art and fashion long enough to get their derriere's torched in WWI? Did some magic spirit choke on a fin-de-siecle?
What happened?
Re:Aaah, Tesla (Score:3, Insightful)
His master idea of remote energy is also awesome. Or better yet, use towers in the stratosphere to collect energy from the giant earth capicator.
Even our space elevator would use energy coming from connecting upper atmosphere to ground.
Too bad there's a lot of flakes out there. It really smears his name.
Re:So what (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. Columbus did discover America. He just wasn't the first one to discover it. He didn't know it was there before he found it, so he discovered it. If you find your wife in bed with another man, would you say you didn't discover her infidelity just because she knew about it first?
-- Steve
Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, history has it's fashions just like everything else humans do. It's been fashionable to tell schoolchildren that everyone thought that the earth was flat before Columbus, even though the size of the earth had been measured, and kings carried septer and orbs symbolizing their control of the earth.
What can be done about it? Wikis can help, because the size doesn't matter. We can include everybody who had any role in an invention. Mostly we need to abolish the myth of the lone inventor creating new stuff without any help from the outside world.
Re:edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti (Score:2, Insightful)
Man, it's a good thing Jobs encourages nice, open competition with hard ware and software.....
Vendor lock-in is vendor lock-in, DRM is DRM, no matter how transparent.
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:1, Insightful)
We think these clever people are scarce rarities because we have been brainwashed to think they are. In reality, the accumulated knowledge we think is so precious is actually rather obvious, and has been lost and re-discovered again and again and again.
Re:Here we go again (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, some people in historic times did some really darned impressive things, long before we would have thought they would have. No, most of our modern knowledge has not been "lost and rediscovered again and again and again."
Back on the original topic: I think it's perfectly reasonable that some day we might be able to recover even older sounds. And perhaps images.
Sound:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/02w307324378k4jm/ [springerlink.com]
"A theoretical model of the acoustic effect of crystallization is suggested based on the representation of a stepwise character of formation or disappearance of macrolayers and macroregions on a growing (or melting) surface. According to this model, the picture of oscillations reproduces in basic features the form of the signals observed in experiments. The oscillation frequency of the liquid is determined by the frequency of generation of jumps at the crystallization front, while the comparatively large values of peak pressures in acoustic waves are a consequence of the resonance phenomena."
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.
Images:
Many materials, both natural and manmade, suffer photodegradation. This is a process in which sunlight excites certain compounds and creates free radicals inside the material, which then, catalytically or not, damage the material from its original state. It seems quite possible to me that holographic information related to what frequencies of light struck where at what angles (and potentially even at what periods of time) could be restored by doing a detailed layer-by-layer atomic scale inspection of the material in question. Certainly I would expect poor temporal resolution (if any at all), but say, if you had an artifact that was in a single room for most of its existance, and then ended up buried with no further exposure to light, perhaps you could reconstruct the average appearance of the room.
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds a bit like Niecpe's first photograph, except even more so. Niecpe's method made a photograph in 1826, but the exposure time was 8 hours and it couldn't be reproduced (no negative). The difference is that in Niepce's case, at least he produced a recognizable image, wheras all Scott managed was some indecipherable (until seriously modern technology came along) squiggly lines on a piece of paper.
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:2, Insightful)
Something to think about (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, think about it. This recording was made before computers, planes, cars, conquering the west and subduing the native hordes, NATO, the UN, electricity, The Church of FSM (blessed be his noodly appendage), and just about everything we take for granted today. Someone long forgotten spent a few seconds singing into a weird contraption, and went on to be completely forgotten by history. And now, so very, very long after the fact, we get to hear those few words singing to us across time.
Really, ignore the debate over Edison, the scratchiness, the French jokes, and everything else, and just realize how very haunting it is to hear this forgotten person, on this forgotten recording, from so very, very long ago.
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Insightful)
he failed miserably at this goal, because nobody can read sound waves.
I think you're missing the point of his invention. Back in 1857, scientists had no other means to visualise sound waves. Therefore a tool that allows you to see sound waves can be of great use, and not only can you use it to better understand sounds but also to study it mathematically (because such an instrument allows you to quantify sounds acoustic phenomenons) and also do some practical things out of it, like for example timing with precision certain sounds (like an echo for example), or even estimating the frequency of certain sounds (you'll need such an instrument if you want to count how many times a second a fly beats its wings).
So yes, it had little practical interest for the general public before playback was possible, just like radioactivity had little interest in the time of Pierre and Marie Curie. Such inventions often find a scientific use a long time before they become interesting to the general public.