Sound recording found in Paris archive thought to be older than Edison’s
Not only did Thomas Edison loose the war on currents, a recently found sound recording appears to be two decades older than his phonograph, according to this New York Times article. The 10 second snippet was found in a Paris archive and was engraved on a piece of paper made black from the smoke of a lamp, using a device called a phonautograph by inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.
“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. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.”
