Casts from the Past

Scenes from the Past loves all things Michigan. Michigan was blessed to be the birthplace and/or home of some of the greatest men, minds, inventors and inventions the world has ever known. Men like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison have strong Michigan roots. (FACT: Although Edison was born in Ohio, he was raised in Port Huron, Michigan, and worked on the Grand Trunk Railroad as a boy).

It has long been a historical “fact” that Thomas Edison was the father of recorded sound, when in 1877, he made a tinfoil phonograph of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. This particular recording is courteousy of the National Park Service via the Internet Archives. Because the original recording was never saved, Edison recreated the moment on August 12, 1927 at the Golden Jubilee of the Phonograph ceremony held at Glenmont (Edison’s home), in West Orange, New Jersey. It was taken from a Movietone Production news film.

Here Thomas Edison recite Mary Had a Little Lamb for yourself:

Imagine my surprise when I read in the New York Times (may require you to login) last month that a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, “a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison”, actually beat Old Tom by almost 20 years!

Excerpts from the March 27th, 2008 New York Times Article by Jody Rosen:

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.

Scott’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.

Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means.”

In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott’s work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound.

“Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery…”

Have a listen to the Firstsounds.org Scott recording via the Internet Archive:

It’s too bad that Scott couldn’t have captured Abraham Lincoln’s voice with his phonautograph, of which you can see pictures of at Talkingmachine.org.

(Ok, now that I’ve actually posted some AUDIO, maybe I’m one step closer to actually posting the long-planned podcast.)

Technorati Tags: audio history, inventions, Phonautograph, phonograph, recording, Thomas Edison

Posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 8:00 am by Scott under Voices from the Past and tagged: audio history, inventions, Phonautograph, phonograph, recording, Thomas Edison. Subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment, or trackback.