The First Recorded Voice

On April 9, 1860 a Parisian inventor named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville was trying to capture an image of sound so he could study it visually. To do this, he invented a device called a phonautograph to scratch sound waves onto a sheet of paper, blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp.

He never intended to play the sound back audibly, but fortunately this piece of blackened paper was preserved in an archive in Paris. It is a 10 second recording of a person singing "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit" which translates to "By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied".

This month, David Giovannoni, an audio historian, learned of the paper's existence and he traveled to France to make very high quality digital scans of the paper. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California converted the scans into sound using technology developed to preserve early sound recordings.

This month, for the first time ever, the world can hear this first 1860 recording. Don't set you expectations too high for it is in very rough shape, but here is the earliest known vocal sound:

http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/index.php

Most of us think of Thomas Edison and his phonograph as the earliest recordings, but in fact Mr. Edison recordings date from 1888. His real claim to fame is not the first audio recording, but the first device to play back an audio recording.

The fine looking woman whose picture accompanies this post has nothing to do with Mr. Scott de Martinville. I picked her photo because it was taken in Paris in 1860. She is Sarah Ellen Frances Mason (1818-1865) and was the wife of a wealthy Bostonian Robert Means Mason (1810-1879). She had severe asthma and the doctors encouraged her to travel to improve her health, which placed her in Paris in 1860.

I have always wondered what Abe Lincoln's voice sounded like...more than anything else in US History, I would love to be able to hear the way he read his famous speeches and the way he spoke in every day conversation. I have always thought that he pre-dated recorded sound. And now I find out he didn't pre-date it, he simply was in the wrong city. Sigh.