jan 6, 1859 - The Phonautograph

Description:

The phonautograph is the earliest known device for recording sound. Edourd-Leon Scott de Martinville, a printer and bookseller by trade, had read up about the structure of the human ear and decided to construct an analogy of the ear canal, eardrum and ossicles, he patented it on the 25th of March 1857. He created several variations of the device. The devices was marketed by Rudolph Koenig in 1959. In accordance with history it did not occur to any inventors before the 1870s that the recordings, called phonoautograms, could contain enough information about the sound that they could within theory and science recreate. Other inventors of the time did produce modified versions of the phonautograph and recorded the sound-modulated line by using various implements in different formats. Several original phonautogram recordings have been re-discovered and were played in sound in 2008 by optically scanning them and using a computer to process the scans into digital audio files.

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