Scott de Martinville records sound earlier than Edison

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by William Atkins

Tuesday, 01 April 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! Previously regarded as the first person to make an audio recording, American inventor Thomas Edison lost this distinction when a recording was found that had been created in 1860 by Parisian inventor Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Related stories Why Pod when you can Plum? IBM keeps unwarranted ears from call centre conversations Adobe ships Acrobat 9 with Flash support but Reader 9 lags MS Messenger 7 reaches Mac Skype 3.8 promises improved audio French inventor Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (1817-1879) is now regarded as having invented the first sound recording device. He patented the invention, what he called the phonautograph, on March 25, 1857. Its patent number is #17,897/31,470. However, Scott de Martinville never played back his recording. Thus, Edison still holds that distinction. In fact, David Giovannoni, one of the people that discovered the Scott de Martinville recording stated that the phonautograph recordings (what are called “phonautograms”) were never intended to be played. Giovannoni explains, “What Scott was trying to do was to write down some sort of image of the sound so that he could study it visually. That was his only intent.” [ABC Science] Giovannoni continued to state, "But actually the truth is he [Scott de Martinville] was the first person to have recorded [sound] and played it back. There were several people working along the lines of Scott, including Alexander Graham Bell, in experimenting—trying to write the visual representation of sound before Edison invented the idea of playing it back.” American inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) is an internationally known inventor of over one thousand different inventions, such as the incandescent light bulb, the industrial research library, carbon microphone (used in telephones), and the electric distribution system (delivery of electricity, which was the basis for his founding of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company). However, now that this recording has surfaced, it is now known that Scott de Martinville made an audio recording seventeen years earlier than Edison. The ten-second recording was made on April 9, 1860 and recorded of a person singing “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” (or, “By the Light of the Moon, Pierrot Replied”)—a piece from a French folksong. The sound will be listened to for the first time on Thursday, March 27, 2008, inside the Braun Music Center at the annual conference of the nonprofit Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University (California). Other samples of sounds from this era will also be played at the conference. How was the Scott de Martinville recording discovered? Please continue. << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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