Paris was clearly the centre of the world in the early days of sound recording. It was there that Leon Scott de Martinville invented his Phonautograph to capture sound onto paper in 1857 and 20 years later Charles Cros took the process forward by working out how to record sound onto a cylinder by tracing oscillations using a screw. In AprilContinue reading “Gathering sounds out of the air. Charles Cros dawdles. Edison dawdles less.”
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The first recording in the history of recorded sound: 17 years before Edison. By a Frenchman!
Twenty years before Edison invented the recording process, Frenchman Leon Scott de Martinville invented a device for recording sound. He called it the Phonautograph and patented it on March 25, 1857. It did what it said on the tin and recorded sound, tracing the shape of sound waves as undulations or other deviations in a line traced on smoke-blackenedContinue reading “The first recording in the history of recorded sound: 17 years before Edison. By a Frenchman!”