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.'"
Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Funny)
Blast it, don't encourage the Anonymous Cowards!
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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.
Even older sounds (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:4, Informative)
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]
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Not Romans, but the aliens Xenu dumped into the volcano. Now their souls are slowly uploading their knowledge into our heads.
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:4, Funny)
It was the Atlantians who had that stuff.
I even heard they had 1024 core computers with terrabytes of ram!
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:4, Funny)
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We also had strap on skate wheels that were also metal.
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Kidding, I saw those strap on wheels as a kid. Never had one, tho. I couldn't, for the life of me, learn to skate.
Damn whippersnappers, get off my lawn!
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I remember those, you wore them over your sneakers, and tightened the metal clamps around your feet with a key. The vibration of metal on pavement would cause numbing foot paralysis within minutes.
And do you think it would ever occur to our parents to put a helmet or shin pads on us? Apparently we were expendable back then.
Oh well,
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This French phonautogram is analagous to visualizations in WinAmp where Edison's recordings would be analagous to the MP3 file.
Bad analogy. More as if de Martinville invented a sound spectrograph (which actually exists since the late 1930s) and Edison invented something to play back spectrographs (which only has been really done since the 1990s it seems). It doesn't diminish Edison's merit though.
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Informative)
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: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.
Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? (Score:5, Funny)
More importantly, though; "Thomas Alva Edison" is so much easier to write than, "Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville". Think of all the trees and ink we'd save!
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
He was the first. (Score:2)
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IMO Edison can still be considered the father of sound recording
While he may not have been the first person to transcribe sound in another medium...
Okie doke.
he was indeed the first to discover a medium that would allow for easy playback - and reproduction as well
No, that was Emile Berliner, who created the first disc record. Edison's was cylindrical, which was difficult (and expensive) to produce and inconvenient to store. Although Edison did consider the disc shape, he did not pursue it and instead focused on the cylinder because he (correctly) felt it was technologically superior.
Years later, after the disc proved to be the better in terms of reproduction costs and storage and all-around convenience, Edison reluctantly abandoned the cylinders in f
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I just recorded an entire immersive virtual world simulation of Ancient Rome on a single Cheerio and have it here at my desk. It's only intended for recording, though - you can't play it back.
Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, if you want to be a scientist, you just have to be smart. If you want to be a well-known-until-the-end-of-time scientist, you have to be smart and suffer from at least a little megalomania [wiktionary.org] (see the war of currents [wikipedia.org] or Einstein's failure to accept quantum theory [wikipedia.org]).
I'm still shocked fewer people don't realize Leibniz beat Newton to Calculus [wikipedia.org]. Oh well, great disputes make for great reading.
Oh well, one could spend countless hours recalling the great debates of science, it's a shame that some of them are about who's name goes in the history books. Strangely, ingenuity & legacy complexes seem to go hand in hand. I'm saddened to think that there may be others buried in history by ultra competitive researchers.
Edison, Newton, Einstein.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Newton beat Leibniz to calculus. Really, the whole thing with Newton was that, he wrote the principia while trying to hide the calculus that he used to invent. It's pretty dif
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.
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This morning my son (2) scribbled a drawing. "This is Salty" he said, his favorite train engine from Thomas the Tank Engine series. Now I kinda knew what it was because he picked the right colors, but in the end it was a bunch of scribbles on a page. A year from now we will have no clue what it is.
My son devised a way to record his thoughts, but not play them back a year from now.
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, Newton, Einstein.... (Score:4, Interesting)
No. History books tend to include enough information concerning major inventions to show that "invention" is an incremental process. People's oral summaries of the history books or history itself tends grossly oversimplify issues because, at a minimum, they have to match the level of detail to the level of interest in order to hold the listener(s).
Humphry Davy [uh.edu] is cursing your name in the afterlife because you've fixated on this Braunsdorf character who merely improved upon pre-existing arc lights. There's another horde of people who likely long before that overloaded a wire, but didn't run off to tell the world how to make a short lived flash of light by screwing up in an impractical manner.
Do you want to know what Thomas Edison invented? Read U.S. Patent No. 223,898. [google.com]. Most importantly, look at claim 1:
1. An electric lamp for giving light by incandescence, consisting of a filiment of carbon of high resistance, made as described, and secured to metallic wires, as set forth.
My public school taught that Edison invented the first practical incandecent bulb by trying several thousand types of materials, not that Edison invented the first electric light. I'm very willing to bet that yours taught something similar as well, but you've oversimplified the information, whether you ment to or not.
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I'd say independently invented. Edison couldn't speak French. He didn't have a formal education. And, the way he thought, about transforming one thing to another, from mechanical to electrical energy and back, probably made it easier for him to see the phonograph independently than it would be to steal someone else's idea.
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"In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott's work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound."
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I think part of being a truely meaningful innovator in history is getting people to notice. Jim Bob may have cold fusion running in his basement but unless he tells people AND gets them to listen, it is merely one man who benefits and not the entire human race. People who seek credit and glory are the ones who do the hard work of bring sc
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Also, it isn't fair to Einstein to say he "failed" to accept quantum theory. He was one of the few to see it for what it was, and never tried to accept it.
Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
But give credit where it's due... Edison not only transferred sound to physical media - he played it back too.
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The similarity in means between Edison and Edouard-Leon is due to the technology of the time with respect to sound more than to a similar goal. In both, a coneis used to capture sound waves and translate them into physical movement of a s
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Re:Awesome (Score:4, Informative)
But give credit where it's due... Edison not only transferred sound to physical media - he played it back too.
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.
According to TFA... (Score:2)
And the first words were ... (Score:4, Funny)
"I surrender!"
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Flight? (Score:3, Interesting)
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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.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont [wikipedia.org]
His plane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14-bis [wikipedia.org]
Be sure to read the comparing the 14-bis to the Wright flyer. If you tack on enough qualifiers, you can make anything be the "first", but as the article mentions, the Wrights had a plane that flew for 20 miles a full year before the 14-bis made its first hop.
Here we go again (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Here we go again (Score:5, Funny)
That would be George Washington Carver Rodrigues LaFitte, the black Hispanic Frenchman who invented a method of storing binary data ao a peanut?
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"While he was living in St. Petersberg, so it was clearly a Russian inwention."
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Well? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well? (Score:5, Informative)
For comparison, the same song sung in 1931: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1931.mp3 [nytimes.com]
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whitehouse.com? And what does that have to do with the first sound recording, which TFA says will be released Friday?
Considering how late some
Re:Well? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well? (Score:5, Funny)
Not quite the same. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not quite the same. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not quite the same. (Score:5, Informative)
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:
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That's like saying that someone invented some hard disk backup software... except that it was impossible to restore anything backed up with it.
Edison was the first to reproduce sound mechanically. Separating it out into recording and playback makes little sense except as an academic exercise. I know the French have a need to claim prior invention on everything (by the way, Ader never had a p
So... (Score:2)
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Possible contents: (Score:5, Funny)
Revisionist History (Score:2)
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History shows us yet again, (Score:3, Interesting)
been done before (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, he could of recorded anything he wanted as long as there was no method of playing it back.
It reminds me of that clever SW speech recognition that decoded audio from the Berghof films of Hitler and Eva Braun - I bet they did not realise that technology would one say be able to decode their speech, HAL would of loved it. Alternatively there were some very clever approaches to scanning vinyl recordings and cleaning up the signal digitally before recontructing the audio without hisses and scratches. This is not new, but its certainly clever.
The Hitler tapes are darn right creepy, I saw a great documentary on it, in fact you can watch the whole thing here:-
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2763127556620650689&q=hitler+speaks+duration%3Along&total=36&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0 [google.com]
On the historical front, it once again proves that in the world of science many people generally work on the same this simultaneously and behind every great man there are many almost great men who got there at the same time or earlier. Of course, everybody knows that Newton got there first...
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.
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Really? So all those people who were living here at the time didn't have any impact?
And what about the vikings from 10 centuries ago who explored Newfoundland [wikipedia.org]? We probably have them to thank for the Newfoundland dog.
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He hyped Western trans-atlantic exploration like nobody before him. The book he wrote describing what he had discovered influenced the explorers who followed in his wake looking for riches, and more importantly their wealthy financiers.
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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
DMCA Violation! (Score:5, Funny)
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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 was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti (Score:2)
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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.
RIAA (Score:3, Funny)
lol (Score:2)
No surprise here (Score:2)
Edison and The Simpsons (Score:4, Funny)
Meh. Don't you people ever watch the X-Files? (Score:2)
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?
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the french light shines on (Score:5, Interesting)
but i think you are right that much of french, and european, glory was cut off at the knees by the wars there starting with the crimean war up through world war ii, with the last one being certainly among the worst human decency devouring spectacles the planet has ever put on. and now it's the usa's turn to get mired in war after war, while the glory of china and india grows to take the spotlight and outshine the usa
Sure, next you're going to tell us... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont [wikipedia.org]
http://www.amazon.com/Wings-Madness-Alberto-Santos-Dumont-Invention/dp/B000FVHJ94 [amazon.com]
Funny how it changed (Score:2)
Many years ago people used to produce, create stuff themselves rather than consume what others have created for them. Writing was more important. Nowadays it's vice versa.
Transcript (Score:5, Funny)
Good Story (Score:2)
For more info on the phonautogragh see http:http://www.talkingmachine.org/phonautograph.html [http]
OK, sure the guy "recorded" sound, he apparently was very upset that Edison beat him to the patent office and generally received all the glory. Somehow though, I think recording 10 seconds on 2 sheets of paper would make an LP sized recording equivalent to an encyclopedia and thus slightly impractical.
http://mrcopilot.blogspot.com/2008/03/ancient-audio-and-phonautograph.html [blogspot.com]
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.
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What good is recording without playback?
FTA:
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."
Visually capturing the sound would theoretically give you more information than a stenographer could record - tone of voice, for example. It would also mean the stenographer wouldn't have to keep up in real time, because they could just analyze the recording later. However, I sure wouldn't want to be the one tasked with "reading" the recording.
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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.
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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.
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He was also working on elecroluminescence, as he considered Edison's tungsten light a waste in thermal energy.
I guess a big concern is what could happen with remote power: we now know the effects of energy through the body, and are still unsure on some frequencies. However, his aha moment came that he realized that only a miniscule amount of energy