Listen to the First Recorded Sound... EVER!
As hard as it is to believe, there was a time, not that long ago, when sound was never recorded. A strange concept for 2012, but in 1857, it was a revolutionary idea. Boing Boing points us to Éduoard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who invented a machine called a phonautograph that "etched sound waves to paper." The recordings were never meant to be heard, as Martinville was able to record the sounds but had no way to actually, you know, play them.
As Boing Boing pointed out last December, "It was meant to be a lab instrument, to help study acoustics, not a method of recording and playing back sound. Apparently, several decades passed before anybody even realized the sounds could, theoretically, be played back."
But now, the recordings have hit the Internet and the first sound is...
A tuning fork and Martinville singing "Au Clair de la Lune."
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