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The phonautograph, invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and patented in 1857, is the earliest known device for recording sound, capturing sound waves as tracings on smoke-blackened surfaces. Although it was not designed for playback, phonautograms recorded before 1861 were successfully converted to audio in 2008, revealing the device's historical significance. This invention laid the groundwork for future sound recording technologies, influencing the development of the gramophone.

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36 views3 pages

Yulu 36

The phonautograph, invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and patented in 1857, is the earliest known device for recording sound, capturing sound waves as tracings on smoke-blackened surfaces. Although it was not designed for playback, phonautograms recorded before 1861 were successfully converted to audio in 2008, revealing the device's historical significance. This invention laid the groundwork for future sound recording technologies, influencing the development of the gramophone.

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kevin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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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.[2] 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".[3] 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, in theory, 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

[edit]
Detail of a phonautogram made in 1859

The phonautograph was patented on March 25, 1857 by Frenchman Édouard-


Léon Scott de Martinville,[4] an editor and typographer of manuscripts at a
scientific publishing house in Paris.[5] 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. [5][6]
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[5] that were scratched into the lampblack.[7] On March 25, 1857,
Scott received the French patent[8] #17,897/31,470 for his device, which he
called a phonautograph.[9] The earliest known intelligible recorded sound of a
human voice was conducted on April 9, 1860 when Scott
recorded[7] someone singing the song "Au Clair de la Lune" ("By the Light of
the Moon") on the device.[10] However, the device was not designed to play
back sounds,[7][11] as Scott intended for people to read back the tracings,
[12]
which he called phonautograms.[6] 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.[13] 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. [6]

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.[7][14] The phonautograph would play a role in the
development of the gramophone, wh

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