Peter Maybury

“William & Frederick Langenheim take photographs of the first solar eclipse visible to North America since the invention of practical
photography. Three years later Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a printer and book-seller in Paris, patents the Phonautograph, the first
machine to record sound (Patent No. 31470). Having worked as a stenographer he is frustrated by the inadequacies of short-hand and seeks a way to preserve the human voice. Under the influence of the Daguerreotype he writes “Sound, just like light, can provide a lasting image at a distance”. While typesetting a physics book be becomes fascinated by the workings of the human ear which he mimics with his invention. A funnel through which sound enters causes a membrane to vibrate, and this in turn moves a stylus. The phonautograph creates visual images – imprints in lampblack – of the sound, but has no means of playback.
2008, scientists in Berkeley, California convert a phonautograph into a digital audio file. These are the earliest recoverable known sound recordings, predating Edison’s phonograph by some 20 years.”