On this day in 1860 the oldest known recording of a human voice was made in France by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the inventor of the Phonoautograph. The Phonoautograph, patented in 1857, was designed to transcribe sound waves as undulations or other deviations in a line traced on smoke-blackened paper or glass. It wasn't until 1877 that Charles Cros realized the phonautograph recordings could be converted back into sound by photoengraving the tracing into a metal surface to create a playable groove. Before Cros was able to put his ideas into practice, the announcement of Thomas Edison's phonograph, which recorded sound waves by indenting them into a sheet of tinfoil from which they could be played back immediately, temporarily relegated Cros's less direct method to obscurity. Below is a video featuring said recording:
Video courtesy of HTnewsroom.
Portions of article and information courtesy of Wikipedia.
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