The phonautograph is the earliest known device for recording sound. Previously, tracings had been obtained of the sound-producing vibratory motions of tuning forks and other objects by physical contact with them, but not of actual sound waves as they propagated through air or other mediums. Invented by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, it was patented on March 25, 1857. It transcribed sound waves as undulations or other deviations in a line traced on smoke-blackened paper or glass. Scott believed that future technology would allow the traces to be deciphered as a kind of "natural stenography". Intended as a laboratory instrument for the study of acoustics, it was used to visually study and measure the amplitude envelopes and waveforms of speech and other sounds or to determine the frequency of a given musical pitch by comparison with a simultaneously recorded reference frequency. It did not occur to anyone before the 1870s that the recordings, called phonautograms, contained enough information about the sound that they could be used to recreate it. Because the phonautogram tracing was an insubstantial two-dimensional line, direct physical playback was impossible in any case. However, several phonautograms recorded before 1861 were successfully converted and played as sound in 2008 by optically scanning them and using a computer to process the scans into digital audio files.
Construction
The phonautograph was patented on March 25, 1857, by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, an editor and typographer of manuscripts at a scientific publishing house in Paris. One day while editing Professor Longet's Traité de Physiologie, he happened upon that customer's engraved illustration of the anatomy of the human ear and conceived of "the imprudent idea of photographing the word". In 1853 or 1854 (Scott cited both years), he began working on "le problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même" ("the problem of speech writing itself"), aiming to build a device that could replicate the function of the human ear. Scott coated a plate of glass with a thin layer of lampblack. He then took an acoustic trumpet, and at its tapered end affixed a thin membrane that served as the analog to the eardrum. At the center of that membrane, he attached a rigid boar's bristle approximately a centimeter long, placed so that it just grazed the lampblack. As the glass plate was slid horizontally in a well-formed groove at a speed of one meter per second, a person would speak into the trumpet, causing the membrane to vibrate and the stylus to trace figures that were scratched into the lampblack. On March 25, 1857, Scott received the French patent #17,897/31,470 for his device, which he called a phonautograph. The earliest known intelligible recorded sound of a human voice was conducted on April 9, 1860 when Scott recorded someone singing the song "Au Clair de la Lune" ("By the Light of the Moon") on the device. However, the device was not designed to play back sounds, as Scott intended for people to read back the tracings, which he called phonautograms. This was not the first time someone had used a device to create direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects, as tuning forks had been used in this way by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807. By late 1857, with support from the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, Scott’s phonautograph was recording sounds with sufficient precision to be adopted by the scientific community, paving the way for the nascent science of acoustics. The device's true significance in the history of recorded sound was not fully realized prior to March 2008, when it was discovered and resurrected in a Paris patent office by First Sounds, an informal collaborative of American audio historians, recording engineers, and sound archivists founded to make the earliest sound recordings available to the public. The phonautograms were then digitally converted by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who were able to play back the recorded sounds, something Scott had never conceived of. Prior to this point, the earliest known record of a human voice was thought to be an 1877 phonograph recording by Thomas Edison. The phonautograph would play a role in the development of the gramophone, whose inventor, Emile Berliner, worked with the phonautograph in the course of developing his own device.
Invention and technical design Scott's phonautograph of 1857 was designed to visually capture sound waves. It used a horn to funnel sound toward a thin membrane, similar to a drumhead. Attached to the membrane was a stylus that scratched the vibrations onto a surface coated with soot, such as smoked paper or glass. As sound entered the horn, the stylus moved in response, producing a wavy line that represented the sound's vibrations. These visual traces, known as phonautograms, were studied for scientific purposes, helping researchers observe the physical properties of sound, such as frequency and amplitude. The device was not intended to reproduce sound but instead to allow for the analysis of its patterns.
Preservation of recordings During his time working with the phonautograph (1857-1861), Scott would begin archiving and preserving his work through various means. His early works with the phonautograph were archived with the Académie Des Sciences, with his work being sealed in an envelope and processed through the pli cacheté system with proof of his work. On March 25, 1857, with funding from the Société d'encouragement Pour l'industrie nationale (SEIN), Scott would also file for a patent, allowing credit to be given to him for innovating "A process by means of which one can write and draw by sound . . . and make industrial uses thereof." Alongside this patent, Scott submitted drawings and actual phonautograms he had recorded. However, since the sound traces of the phonautograms were made of soot traces and not ink, as the law required, only his drawings appeared in the official patent. Even so, Scott successfully cemented his idea and innovation into the French archives through patenting.
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