The earliest known recording of the human voice was captured
On this day · 9 April 1860
Seventeen years before Edison, a Parisian inventor scratched a French folk song into soot — and never heard it play back.
On April 9, 1860, the French printer and bookseller Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded a voice singing the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” on his phonautograph — the earliest clearly recognizable record of a human voice yet recovered.
His machine was never meant to play anything back. A horn funneled sound onto a membrane tipped with a boar’s bristle, which traced wavering lines onto paper blackened by lamp soot. Scott wanted to see sound, not replay it, and he deposited the sheets with France’s Academy of Sciences in 1861, where they sat as silent squiggles for nearly 150 years.
The recording predates Edison’s phonograph by 17 years.
Not until 2008 did researchers at the First Sounds project optically scan the tracings and convert them into audible sound. The slow, ghostly voice that emerged — almost certainly Scott’s own — turned a forgotten experiment into the oldest playable echo of how a person once sounded.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
