World's Oldest Voice Recording

This 10-second recording was made by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on April 9 1860, when Emperor Napoleon III, the last monarch of France, was on the throne. It was made a whole 17 years before Thomas Edison made his historic message, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a phonograph, which is the landmark event in the history of recorded sound. Scott de Martinville's gadget, a "phonautograph", was a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke from an oil lamp. However, it wasn't until now that the recording could actually be played back. Using digital imaging to track the tiny groove in the paper, First Sounds, a collaborative US project aimed at resurrecting long-lost early recordings, was able to finally retrieve the recording, which can be heard here.

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