I always find it hard to put into words what’s uniquely special about the phonautogram of “Au Clair de la Lune” recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860. On one hand, it stands out for the central role it’s played in the recent history of the playback of the world’s oldest recorded…
The oldest recorded human voice that can be heard intelligibly today dates from April 9, 1860: a ghostly snippet of the folksong “Au Clair de la Lune,” played back in March 2008 after lying silent for nearly a century and a half. For twenty seconds, someone living in the Second French Empire of Napoleon III…
You probably know that the phonautograms of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville are the world’s oldest records of airborne sound, and that we can play them back today as audio. But we can reconstruct another kind of motion from them as well. Many phonautograms contain all the information we need to assemble movies with sound in…
In 1859, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant named Charles N. Bancker bought a phonautograph for his lavish private collection of scientific apparatus. It may have been the first phonautograph ever sold, and perhaps even the first one professionally built. In 1871, Professor Henry Morton bought it from Bancker’s estate in turn—together with a collection of phonautograms—on…
