The First Recorded Sound

The world's first voice recording dates back to 1860, more than 17 years before Edison's phonograph was invented

Thomas Edison's “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil in 1877 wasn't the first recorded sound. A Frenchman named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville was the first to record sound almost two decades earlier.

Scott de Martinville's Phonautograph

Scott de Martinville invented a device called the phonautograph, and, on April 9, 1860, recorded someone singing the words, "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit." Scott never had an intention of playing it back. He just wanted to study the pattern the sound waves made on a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp.

He made the recording using two styli—one driven by the vibrations of a tuning fork, the other driven by a membrane vibrating in sync with the voice. Scott then removed the paper from the cylinder and immersed it in an alcohol-based fixative.

The 10-second clip of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune," was discovered by audio historian David Giovannoni. Giovannoni found that this first recording, along with other related documents, had been entrusted by Scott to the Institute of France’s Academy of Sciences in the summer of 1861.

The first voice recording has recently gone digital, being professional reproduced by Dust-to-Digital, an Atlanta recording studio, relying on a complex sound algorithm.

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