Earliest Intelligible Sound Recording Found

Thomas Edison has long been considered the father of sound but a recording from 1860 has been demonstrated that features a woman singing.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.

The recording will be presented on Friday along with recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.

The New York Times has the 1860 recording.