Thomas Edison has always been credited as the first person to record sound, but scientists have just discovered he wasn’t.
Edison was the first person to record sound intentionally and play it back, but some French scientists inadvertently managed to record a woman singing a song nearly 20 years before Edison patented the phonograph.
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.
Best of all, the researchers who made this discovery, put made the recording into an MP3 and put it online. Click to hear a voice (though admittedly a very garbled voice) that predates the Civil War.
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