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hi I'm David Jovan Oni and I'm one of the people who discovered and deciphered humanity's first recordings of its own voice in 2007 which Martin Megan Hennessey Patrick Feaster and I organized an initiative to make the world's oldest sound recordings available to all people for all time we call our initiative first sounds first sounds is a loose information sharing collaborative through which we facilitate the efforts of a broad range of individuals who share our goals and our passions and who freely give their time and resources every first sounds achievement is the result of their personal commitment and their collaborative spirit we share our findings on the web under a Creative Commons license to facilitate their dissemination and use you can see and hear our work at first sounds org as my radio colleague Ira Glass would say my presentation is in nine acts beginning with act 1 the time machine in which any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic when Americans went to bed on March 26th 2008 we were in general accord that Thomas Edison had invented sound recording but when we woke up the next day we heard this voice gently singing to us in French firmly telling us we were mistaken this rendition of the French folk song Oh clair de la lune resurrected from a vault in Paris only days before is ghostly haunting enchanting and we later learned played back at the wrong speed yet until that day the very existence of such a recording had literally been the stuff of science fiction It was as if we had discovered time-travel or at least a machine that could send your voice into the future in the next 50 minutes I'll relate our discoveries as they unfolded as you'll see the deeper we got into our 21st century quest the farther back into the 19th century we went this might be a bit confusing so watch for the timeline as the stories unfold our timeline will push further and further into the past act to the silent decade our quest for sounds recorded between 1877 and 1887 when we established first sounds back in 2007 the earliest sounds anyone could hear were recorded in 1888 that same year 1888 Edison's London emissary hosted a dinner followed by a Phonographic soiree in attendance was Arthur Sullivan not yet sir Arthur of Gilbert and Sullivan who recorded this toast to Thomas Edison these recordings were made in 1888 on Edison's newly invented wax cylinders which we can play today without damage Edison had invented the phonograph ten years earlier and the tin foil recordings that survived from that period cannot be played without damaging them so that creates a whole silent decade in which recordings were made but which nobody living today had heard one of the first things first sounds asked was do any silent decade recording survive that we might be able to play whether on tin foil or any other medium the answer is yes quite a few for instance just months after inventing the phonograph Edison and his men recorded the sounds of the brand-new elevated railway in Manhattan directors of the railroad were receiving all sorts of complaints about the noise and they engaged The Wizard of Menlo Park to identify and mitigate the sources of the noise notice the railroad director here with the bag of money in his pocket Edison's approach was to record the sounds onto paper covered with a fine layer of soot he could have recorded these sounds on the foil and played them back in his lab but he made the recordings on paper because he wanted to examine them visually here's a close-up from one of these recordings you see here it says September 19th em er R stands for the Metropolitan elevated railroad you see an arrow with the words train down something starts at that point ends several traces later with an X you can see sound waves traced into the soot covered paper they have modulation probably sound in there these recordings are preserved in their original notebooks at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey one of first sounds first accomplishments was to determine that these recordings could in fact be played back working with curator Jerry Fabrice we made high-resolution optical digitization zuv each sheet Jerry had long wanted preservation great images of these recordings and were pleased that first sounds was able to contribute those to the archives we selected a portion of one sheet processed the traces for clarity and sent them to Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley labs who used the labs virtual stylus software built with support from the Library of Congress to convert the squiggles on the page into sound in December 2007 this snippet became the very first sound from 1878 to be heard by modern ears we think these are vocalizations at the beginning of a recording something like hello testing is this thing on the voices aren't quite interpretable but in evoking them we established a powerful proof of concept that our digitization procedure and Berklee's software could indeed playback recordings made in suit and as you can imagine we were elated this was the first recording from the silent decade to be heard by modern ears all told the edison site has 19 elevated railroad recordings from 1878 every one of which poses an array of significant challenges but personally I have high hopes for what we might hear contemporary accounts tell us that recordings were made inside the rail cars traveling at high speed recordings were also made from the street and these may have captured other sounds of New York City in that hot summer of 1878 we know that Edison often chose colorful language and perhaps these traces captured an example or two of that but most importantly these are quite possibly the earliest surviving playable recordings of ambient sound made on American soil or anywhere another recording from the silent decade this one in tin foil was purportedly made by Edison and Sarah Bernhardt during her visit to the lab in 1880 I've examined the foil in the Henry Ford archives in Dearborn and I'm saddened to report that it hasn't survived the ravages of time very well but given that Wizard Edison was more than a bit smitten by divine Sarah's charms I suspect there tete-a-tete would be particularly interesting to hear act 3 before the phonograph our quest for sounds recorded before 1877 as I noted earlier Edison could have recorded the elevated railroad sounds onto foil and played them back in his lab but he recorded them onto paper because he wanted to examine them visually this was not a new idea airborne sounds had been traced onto paper since the 1850s by a machine called the phonautograph throughout the 1860s and 70s any well appointed cabinet of acoustical instruments required if an autograph to capture and study the qualities of airborne sounds when we began our quest we didn't know if any fun autograph recordings from the 1860s or 70s survived of course we'd heard of this frenchman Eduard liang scott de martinville who invented the phonograph that the instrument maker rudolf Koenig sold from his Atelier in Paris we knew that Liane Scott as he signed his name had applied for a patent on his invention in 1857 and that he updated his application in 1859 his earliest machine from 1857 recorded on a flat sled that moved along a tabletop his 1859 machine recorded on a revolving cylinder and in this form Scott's phone autograph eerily anticipated photographs of the future with the help of valerie marshall and steve galicia of the french Patent Office we made high-resolution digitization zuv Scott's patent documents so that we could translate and study them closely there are two funada grams in the patent applications unfortunately they yield no voices however the patent documents themselves give us tremendous insight into the sources of Scott's inspiration act for organizing the echo Scott's quest to do for sound with the camera did for light photography was all the rage when Scott first started thinking about the funada graph this is generally considered to be the first photograph taken from nature an eight-hour exposure it was made in 1826 in France by Joseph nips it's the view from the second-story window of his country house the photograph was an inspiration for Scott's phone autograph or actually his fanatic Graham if the ephemeral reflections of light could be inscribed on a plate why couldn't the effervescent echoes of sound indeed the idea of doing for sound with the camera did for light was very much in the air at this time of extraordinary invention for instance in the u.s. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the Sun paints referring to the camera's ability to channel light into a permanent image he then predicted presently we shall organize the echo as now we do the shadow Scott wasn't a poet but he was a man of letters being a typesetter and proofreader by trade his vision of sound photography was not nearly as poetic as Emerson's but it was certainly more specific in its applications he wrote and here I paraphrase is there a possibility of achieving for sound a result analogous to that now attained for light by photography can the musical phrase escaped from the singers lips right itself without the musicians knowledge on a docile paper and leave an imperishable trace of fugitive melodies will one be able to place between two men an autograph externa coffer that preserves their discussion and it's my newest detail while adapting to the speed of their conversation automatic stenography was an application to which Scott was naturally drawn his father had published a book on the subject in 18-49 and as a typesetter he saw great advantages in working from transcripts made by the author's own voice free of the imperfect interventions of a human interpreter he gave the example shown here in a patent document he assumed one could learn to read the waveforms made by the voice and interpret them by eye into written script stenography and photography were certainly two of Scott's inspirations but perhaps the most inspirational to Scott was the human ear itself Scott writes that he was correcting proofs for professor long J's treatise on physiology when he got the idea of building an apparatus that would mimic the workings of the human ear and fix sounds graphically similar devices had appeared before but none of them took sounds out of the air Scott's singular realization was that energy from airborne sounds could be inscribed onto a permanent medium over time to his knowledge and to ours no one had done that before he tells us that he made his first artificial ear experiments in 1853 or 1854 his earliest device is lost to history but he did leave us with two of his earliest proofs of concept both from that first year either 1853 or 1854 he gave both dates the markings on the left plate were actuated by voice the markings on the right were actuated by a guitar unfortunately while these squiggles were powered by sounds their waveforms are too distorted to retrieve the sounds so here's what we knew at the end of the year 2007 we knew that Scott was recording sounds from the air over time on to permanent media between around 1854 and 1859 he seems to be the first person to have done so taking as his inspirations the ear photography and stenography every recording we had seen so far was not playable but something was telling us that if we looked in the right places there would be sound to be found act 5 lost and found a sound our quest to locate the world's first sound recordings early in 1878 when Edison was receiving all sorts of attention for his magnificent tin foil phonograph Scott looked on and he seen as the international press ignored his work of 20 years before being in the book business he self-published a slender volume in which he set forth the priority of his invention although it starts with something of a rant against Edison Scott's book carefully and completely reprinted the text of almost every document he'd ever prepared regarding the funada graph this was our map to the treasure here you see the patent documents from 1857 and 1859 here he speaks of a communication to the Society of encouragement in 1857 that led us to this document which told us unfortunately that Scott's work with the Society for encouragement of national industry had been lost in a flood and here we see two deposits by Scott at the Academy of Sciences one in 1857 and one in 1861 late in 2007 our researcher in Paris Arleen gotten urine identified the Scott dossier at the French Academy of Sciences and commissioned photos to be sent to me in the States a CD full of images arrived at my home on February 29th 2008 as I opened each image I saw Scott's hand written explanations of his approach his procedures his equipment his experiments and affa not a gram and another fernanda gram and ooh a lucious funada gram all told seven complete funada grams everyone in frustratingly fuzzy low res jpg artifact written focus but all were from 1860 28 years before the first wax cylinder recordings 17 years before Edison invented the phonograph and I immediately called Patrick Feaster with the news we were just weeks away from unveiling first sounds at a major conference at Stanford University we knew our recovery of sounds from Edison's 1878 recordings would be noteworthy but if we could get these funada grams from 1860 to talk now that would be newsworthy should I risk a trip to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris to get better digitization x' could we in fact negotiate the privilege of getting into the archives would there be enough time to process these images and even if we could return to the US with scans in time with the fenomena grams speak or sing to us at all one of the great things about the informal structure of first sounds is that I didn't have to ask anyone's permission my translator and I got on the phone negotiated with the director of the archives hopped on to the next plane to Paris ingratiate ourselves into the archives and well as you know our gamble paid off we did indeed acquire the images and coax a fanatic ram from 1860 to sing our results were indeed newsworthy we had recovered what we believed to be humanity's first playable recording of its own voice we'd prepared a press release with all the basic information but let me tell you when your story breaks on the front page of the New York Times you don't need no stinkin release within hours this was an international story the American Thomas Edison is widely regarded as the father of recorded sound but there are claims now that mr. Edison was beaten to it by 17 years by a Frenchman audio historians have dug up a recording made in 1860 on what's known as a fort phone autograph a device created by Parisian inventor Edward Leon scott de martinville and for the first time found a way of playing the sound out loud on a short clip a woman can be heard singing oh clair de la lune and I spoke earlier to the inventors great-grandson Lawhorn scott de martinville and played that recording to him the first time he had heard it I'm so happy for him because in his last will he asked his children and grandchildren to make sure that his discovery would not be ignored this is a moral Taff that was given to us by basil handwritten will Witcher this one I have at home and we were particularly proud in the family we tried to restore his memory my father and also my grandfather and they had marble plate that was put on the wall of the National Library Vivian in Paris that was the place where he lived for the last period of his life and he passed away and on this plate it is said that he had invented how to record sounds as a matter of fact when when he passed away he had just been as a spectator assisting to the presentation of mr. Edison's invention in Paris and his name was not even mentioned and he was so upset that I believe that this is one of the reasons that eventually ended tragically this is gonna require the rewriting and awful lot of history books isn't it well only a few sentences but key ones as long scott de martinville as you can tell Laurent is a diplomat literally having spent 20 years in China negotiating trade agreements between the French and Chinese he also takes his great-grandfather's charge seriously and personally not only has he opened the family archives for us he's also opened doors that only a Frenchman with his savoir faire can in fact Laurent was instrumental in helping us find an even earlier cache of his great-grandfather's fanatic Rams the story begins when Valerie and Steve are friends at the French Patent Office invited Laurent to see for the very first time his great-grandfather's patent applications it was a fabulous meeting we lingered over each handwritten page steeped ourselves in the inventors milieu and told stories about our quest to locate and understand Scott's work Laura read to us from his great-grandfather's own copy of his 1878 book the treasure map in which he tells how the patent application in front of us was supported by the Society for the encouragement for national industry remember the Society for encouragement for national industry the archives that got lost in a flood as reported by the Journal of the history of science society I was lamenting this fact when Valerie sparked to attention speaking rapidly to Laura in French which I don't understand she left the room if you ever want to conduct research at the French Patent Office you'll need a copy of this guide to the archives which was written by Valerie and her colleague Gerard M tous ceux when Valerie left the room Laurent put it together for me he said Valerie is calling her colleague professor M toes he is in charge of the archives at the Society of encouragement for national industry she does not believe that all of the archives were destroyed and she has left to call gerard and ask him to personally look for the scott dossier i presume you are okay with that professor Antos was out of the office and i flew back to the states without meeting him but days later we were corresponding by email in one message I wrote Scott presented prints of fanatic Rams to the society in the fall of 1857 if they survive in your archives they would be among the earliest recordings of airborne sounds in existence sure I wrote back we have located a dossier of 36 documents comprised of correspondence and various experiments in our opinion this exceptional file should make it possible to reconstitute with precision the advancements made by Scott in concert with the society what seems to us most exceptional are the original sheets of recorded sounds they are quite fragile documents being of soot deposited on thin paper in other words sonata grams we invite you to Paris to scan these documents although an appointment will be necessary I have available Friday December 5th cordially professor Gerard M toes I received this email on Saturday November 29th but you can bet that on Friday December 5th I was back in Paris it was immediately evident that these would be among our most important excavations to date direct evidence of what Scott did and when he did it over the course of a whole year of experimentation 1857 I felt as if our pursuit of the earliest sound recordings had wrapped back in time to converge with Scotts pursuits we were now in the same groove if you will and the sounds encoded in that groove were what we both sought to decipher and under and so after a day at the society examining these newly discovered documents and with digitization gear in tow on the way back to the hotel I called Patrick to tell him the news before I can convey to you just how wrong I was we need to review a few technical aspects of funada Graham's act six reading the calligraphy our quest for signal in scott de martinville tracings scott intended to make sounds write themselves so it's only natural that he saw his tracings as brush strokes for scott this was a form of automatic calligraphy replete with its own conventions and aesthetics but for those of us seeking to extract the original sounds that created these traces scott's results are frustratingly imprecise as he had no intention of playing back these traces he didn't need to observe the basic technical requirements of sound recording that we all take for granted for instance the requirement that the recording stylus stay in the groove or in this case on the paper for Scott's purposes it didn't matter if the stylus lifted off the page once in a while and then of course when the stylus came back down it often smeared the trace in 21st century terms there's a lot of missing and ambiguous signal on these recordings and that's not the worst of it here's Scott's diaphragm and stylus assembly from his patent application of 1859 the stylus is made of 2p is a stiff but yielding shaft he's used a hogs bristle here tipped with a small piece of feather remember he was inscribing in soot and a thin stylus like a hogs bristle would not draw a discernible line in the smoke he needed a feather brush to make the calligraphic strokes visible here he shows how the recording head addresses the recording surface notice how the tip of the stylus hits the paper at an angle thereby skewing the signal in the trace again while not an issue for Scott this is a big problem for us because sound recording demands that the stylus move absolutely perpendicular to the time axis all of Scott's recordings are skewed to some degree in some cases we can compensate for it in the image domain before converting to sound like this but sometimes the skew is so bad and the travel of the stylus so great that the tracing loops back on itself it actually moves backward in the time dimension I believe that with the right model and a lot of trigonometry these tracings may someday be untangled but until then no image to audio conversion software can handle this signal as expressed on the page the documents we discovered at the Society of encouragement for national industry are rife with these shortcomings they are after all from Scott's first year of experimentation and that's why I declared in my phone call to Patrick that we'd never get sound off of them because Berkeley's software couldn't track them but as I said Patrick proved me wrong here's how here's a funada graph tracing as processed by berkeley their software tracks the center of the trace in the image domain and converts the centered signal to sound but what about this crazy waveform you really can't track it because it's often in two or more places at once so Patrick wondered what would happen if instead of tracking the waveform exactly we could get just a close approximation he took as his inspiration the optical soundtrack used in film in which the analog audio signal is represented by the amount of light that gets through the soundtrack changes in brightness correspond with changes in audio amplitude Patrick's technique fills in the area on either side of the trace it ignores the traces Center and fills only to the two edges it rearranges the parts to resemble a film soundtrack then scans the track for brightness using image to Sound software the result is an audio waveform comparing the resulting waveform to the original funada Graham we can see it's not a perfect representation of the recorded trace but therein lies its brilliance because the trace itself can't be played it's not directly interprete Balai any form of virtual stylus available today but the waveform created by Patrick's process can be played it is interprete Bellaire and that's what counts at this stage of study Patrick's approach offers a robust forensic tool that lets us hear at least something from funada grams that are otherwise unplayable as inscribed we can hear the melody of a song for instance or the pitch and cadence of speech and what we hear helps us better understand scott's activities and intentions act 7 finding Edward Lyon our quest to interpret scott de martinville intent one of the very first funada grams on which patrick used his new technique was this one number 8 made in 1860 and deposited by Scott with the French Academy of Sciences in the same dossier as Boclair number 8 contains the opening lines from Aminta torkado Tasos classic play from 1573 here Scott wrote the opening words in the margin given the loops and lifts and crazy waveforms traced on this page I thought we'd never hear what was recorded on it but the playback from Patrick's technique is amazingly interpretable as if hearing a recording made in 1860 isn't cool enough this is the voice of the inventor himself here's how we know this is the voice of the inventor Scott wrote in the margins I was wrong it should have been ooh money for me not for me ooh money before we heard this we didn't know if Scott was referring to the words written on the page which are in fact transposed or to the words spoken in the recording now that we can hear the recording we know that he transposed both so by admitting it was his mistake by saying I was wrong Scott identifies himself as the speaker how cool is that and here's where it gets even more interesting Scott simultaneously records two things side by side on both Aminta and o'clair on one track is the voice as captured from the air on the other are the vibrations of a tuning fork or the APA's on so why did he record a tune fork when he was really interested in recording the sounds from the air well it's important to remember that Scot was developing his phone autograph as a laboratory instrument he understood that cranking the mandrel by hand yielded an uneven rotational speed so to calibrate the voice recording in time he traced the vibrations of a tuning fork alongside the voice track as a time reference 19th century timecode how totally steampunked of him when we convert each funada gram from an image to sound we process each of the two tracks in parallel here's what Boclair sounded like when we first heard it on the left is the voice and on the right is the tuning fork you can hear the wobbliness of Scots cranking as he made the recording let's isolate just the tuning fork track the pattern of Scots cranking becomes very apparent with today's technologies we can stabilize the voice recording by stretching or squishing the tuning fork track to compensate for the variations in cranking speed after time correction the tuning fork track goes from this to this once the fork is stabilized the voice snaps into place it goes from shaky to solid another advanced feature of scott's to channel recordings the pitch of the tuning fork establishes the correct playback speed Scott wrote that his tuning fork was calibrated to 500 simple vibrations per second when we first played Eau Claire back in 2008 we had to determine what he meant by that today we measure frequency in cycles a cycle meaning a full positive and negative excursion of the sound wave but in the 19th century French acousticians measured things differently for them a simple vibration was half a cycle what we call one cycle they called a double vibration the combination of two simple vibrations we've done our homework and we knew that but it wasn't clear to us that Scott knew that on screen right now is one of his own explanatory diagrams from A to B he writes is one simple vibration from a to alpha he contends is one double vibration notice that his terminology is in conflict with his colleagues a 2b is actually a half of what they'd call a simple vibration and a two alpha rather than being a double vibration per Scott was actually a single vibration in common French parlance confused well so were we by 500 simple vibrations per second Scott could have meant that his tuning fork was vibrating at 125 Hertz or 500 of these as his own notes imply or at 250 Hertz 500 of these as acousticians of the day would have understood or at 500 Hertz the unit that seems most obvious to us today Scott wasn't a scientist so we can excuse his confusion but he did leave us with a conundrum as we prepare to Claire for its world premiere and to eight we settled on 500 Hertz as the voice that sounded most right to us and in doing so we introduced the now iconic voice of a haunting apparition to the world but wait a minute Scott writes that he recorded a Minto with the same tuning fork as eau claire and when we first played back Aminta at 500 Hertz this is what we heard both the cadence and the pitch are unnatural clearly this is too fast so without a doubt Scotts fork vibrated at 250 Hertz not 500 Hertz well this changes everything it suggests that Eau Claire was played back twice as fast as it should be and sure enough when we slowed o'clair to the same calibration speed as a minta Scott's self-identified voice appears from the smoke this is Scott speaking slowly clearly lugubriously as he watches the stylus vibrate to the sounds of his own voice we had also played back a recording of a vocal scale made in May 1862 stam unthe after o'clair at the same speed as au clair but again when we slowed the recording to its correct speed the voice of the inventor conducting an experiment again emerges we meet this discovery early in 2009 nearly a year after releasing our initial interpretation of Eau Claire into the world our initial discovery had prompted a lot of romantic poetry of the beckoning Parisienne phantasm reaching across time through a veil of smoke that would never part and so forth and so on but now we'd opened a different window onto time and through that window we were hearing the voice of a lone inventor conducting an experiment recording sound in Paris the second French Empire before the American Civil War the first human in history to preserve his own voice and send it into the future I'd like to play for you one more of Scott's 1860 recordings from his Academy of Sciences deposit in this he sings a lively rendition of fly little B from a comic opera by victor masse written just four years before to our knowledge this is Scott's last funada Graham from the fall of 1860 it's certainly one of his most melodic joyful and playful recordings perhaps he just got tired of conducting experiments so with the 1860 recordings played at the right speeds our correction of the record is complete let me state the facts clearly the April 9th 1865 oak clair de la lune currently stands as humanity's first dated and playable recording of its own voice it was sung by Edward Lee all scott de martinville in Paris France and that's the last word on the subject at least until we discover him play something earlier act 8 the imperfect mirror the quest for fidelity between the inscribed line and the sound that produced it as noted earlier Scott wasn't a scientist but through his work at the Martin a printing house he met enough scientists and learned enough about their pursuits to realize that the fledgling field of acoustics could benefit from an instrument that registered airborne sounds in January 1857 he deposited his earliest experiments at the French Academy of Sciences entered into the record by Academy members clogged Pouilly ennui Victor Renault and Claude Bernard about the same time his work was noted by the Society of encouragement for national industry a body established to promote ideas and technologies in service to French industry the Society of encouragement spawned into practice with the academy of sciences sieved in theory the society gave Scott the funds to register his initial March 1857 patent and to conduct experiments from spring through fall with members of the society at his side members such as julissa Jew a pioneer in the science of acoustics Lisa Xu first demonstrated the figures that bear his name while working with Scott in 1857 Scott reported his progress to the society late in 1857 complete with samples of funada grams Lisa Shue assembled these documents into the dossier we saw earlier as he undertook his evaluation for the Society's committee of Economic Arts on the surface Lisa shoes evaluation is quite positive it clearly states that Scott's original contribution was to trace the vibrations of airborne sounds onto a permanent medium over time he wrote and I paraphrase if the apparatus were to measure only pitch and timbre this would still be of great service to science however mr. Scott driven by an overly vivid imagination seeks in these traces information of a higher order he believes his apparatus can indicate articulation we believe on this point is completely in error it would be wrong for us to dismiss Lisa Hughes conclusion as short-sighted as it was based on his legitimate concern about the accuracy of the funada graphs tracings that is the fidelity between the inscribed line and the sound that produced it this would not be a concern Lisa Shue continued if the movement of the membrane were the faithful translation of the motion of the air which agitates it and if the motion of the stylus represented the motion of the membrane with the same facility unfortunately he concluded these intermediaries disfigure the vibration exactly as a mirror of a regular surface modifies the aspect of a figure seen in it so here's the crux of the problem that would frustrate Scot for the rest of his days limitations in the technology limitations in acoustical theory and limitations in his ability to demonstrate to the scientific establishment that there was more information in his phone autographic tracings than met the eye today we have that technology and we can now state without reservation that both men were right we can indeed coax from the trace recognizable sounds interpretable words the articulations that Scot believed were there yet as Lisa jus feared they are most certainly disfigured distorted as the vibrations may be they open a window onto the following experiment that Lisa Zhu himself may have attended in 1857 an experiment to determine the fnatic rafts ability to record the tambour of a musical instrument this is the earliest airborne sound reproduced to date let me be clear Auclair remains humanity's first playable dated recording of its own voice but this scale played by an unidentified cornetist holds the record for the earliest airborne sound recording reproduced to date 1857 three years before oh Claire de Lune 1857 20 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph 1857 31 years earlier than any recording any living person had heard before first sounds made the silent decade speak act 9 did the French invent everything our quest for international Accord we begin with the obvious Edward Lee all scott de martinville invented sound recording now this was not obvious before 2008 because at that time we had no proof sure we knew that Scott conceived the idea of recording airborne sounds over time and we knew this idea had been put into practice by kernig and other instrument makers but only after we located his own recordings and only after we evoke t' interpretable sound from them did we know for sure that Scott's traces were accurate enough to be called sound recordings now that we're certain he succeeded our accolades go to mr. Scott of Paris the French hold that Charles crow anticipated Edison's idea of sound reproduction based on Crowes handwritten plea cash a deposited with the French Academy of Sciences in April of 1877 this claim is true in suggesting that Scots traces be photo engraved and used to drive a diaphragm in other words by reversing the process of recording Charles crow anticipated the idea of sound reproduction before Edison for that we must give Monsieur Crowe his due recognition a few weeks later Edison and his men came to a similar idea by a very different route they used a stylus to indent the vibrations of a telephone receiver on a moving strip of paper by pulling the indented paper under a second stylus and diaphragm they essentially put the vibrations back into the air by all accounts they recorded and played back speech all summer long without grasping the full import of this invention early in the fall of 1877 during edward johnson's lectures about Edison's recent experiments the marvel of capturing and reviving voices became manifestly evident to audiences and to the press so much so that Johnson cut short his lecture tour raced back to the lab and encouraged the inventor to develop this idea which Edison did a month later the iconic first phonograph was built so while the idea of sound reproduction was in the air on both sides of the Atlantic in 1877 it was Thomas Edison Charles Batchelor John Kruse II and others in Menlo Park New Jersey who built the first self-contained system that captured stored and reproduced airborne sounds the historical record is clear each of these 3 men Edward leon scott de martinville charles crow and thomas edison each conceived of something new and each deserves credit and recognition unfortunately edward leon scott de martinville died in 1879 without receiving his due recognition left without funds or pension his family was forced to yield his remains to an unmarked grave lawrence scott de martinville has searched all of paris but has yet to find his great-grandfather's final place of rest what an irony the first man to send his voice into the future lost forever in Paris resurrected for all time in America so that's the story of how first sounds discovered and played back humanity's first recordings of its own voice for more information go to first sound org I'm David Giannone thanks for listening