Sound recording predates Edison's phonograph

It's not exactly Gershwin's "An American in Paris," but there is one thing very significant about an archaic 10-second recording discovered earlier this month in the City of Lights by a group of American audio historians: it is the earliest known sound recording. The phonoautograph of the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was made in 1860, some 17 years before the advent of Thomas Edison's phonograph. And get this: it was a visual tool, not an audio one. Still, scientists figured out how to make it play.

Read more at The New York Times: "Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison"

[mnemonician]

Let us see if the history books will now be revised, or will Edison continue to be regarded as the inventor of recorded audio... ?

[Romasteve]

And what about Emile Berliner? He won a patent fight with Edison for the disk phonograph...and they CD is a varient of his invention. And he was my great-grandfather as well
Stephen in Rome

[Romasteve]

I meant "the CD" not they CD, sorry

[Mercury23]

How do they know it's a 10 second recording if these "scientist" haven't figured out how to make it play?

[Romasteve]

They did figure out how to play it. High tech to the rescue!

[Romasteve]

I think the article said you could hear someone, probably a lady, singing Clair de Lune! Stephen in Rome

[walwebster]

If the facts are right, then no doubt about it -- move over, Thomas Alva! And before anybody carps about it only being 10 seconds or so of scratches, cast your mind back to the first random access devices on computers, magnetic disks that were capable of storing as much as a whole megabyte! (and sometimes even reading it back again, all in less than a second!) (or two ...).

Yet nobody doubts that they were the earliest beginnings of today's petabyte-in-a-bookmatch drives ...

[almoore8]

I dunno, this "audio" wasn't intended to be playable, wasn't playable at the time, and is only playable now using modern computer technology. It was only supposed to be a visual representation of sound waves.