Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a 19th century Frenchman, must have had a revelation around 1853 that led to what was thought to be a failed invention for close to 150 years. This was a time when photography was all the rage in Paris and people were fascinated with the idea that one could replace the artists eye and hand with a mechanical device employing glass and silver alloy film.
Scott was passionate about photography as he saw how photography was able to freeze time, capture the moment, and immortalize the visual.
His revelation must have gone somewhat like this: A camera can freeze time for the eye, but what about the ear? His thoughts were with all the actors, singers, and musicians, whose legacy of talent and devotion would vanish with their physical demise and no record of their greatness would exist even into the near future. As Scott wrote:
“Will one be able to preserve for future generations some feature of the diction. Of those eminent actors, those grand artists who will die without leaving behind them the faintest trace of their genius.“
Scott was a printer by trade and as such focused on capturing and storing the written word on paper and thus transporting knowledge into the future. But as a young inventor his blood was stirred by the idea of accomplishing something similar to the spoken word... How about a printer for sound, a camera for the ear? He must have thought.
At the time science barely understood the nature of sound as being small pressure ripples running through a gas or solid. Here was the remarkable thing that Scott de Martinville accomplished: He dedicated a fair portion of his life to the visualization of sound without any clear idea or prospect of how to ever capitalize on it or to even reproduce it.
His device resembled the cylinder phonographs that were not yet invented until 1878. But his invention really was only half a phonograph. Instead of using a stylus to scratch the waveform onto a wax cylinder to be able to reproduce it at a later date, he used printers black to merely paint such cylinders and a swab connected to a membrane located at the end of a funnel to wipe the cylinder clean in the form of a sound wave. By rolling the cylinder onto a sheet of paper, the sound waves were visualized. He named his device the Phonautograph. The resulting print was named a Phonautogram.
Now as ingenious as this was, its merit was completely elusive to the general public. Looking at sound waves drawn on a sheet of paper was clearly under-entertaining compared to say, a full blown opera at the Scala. He was however, relentless in his production of Phonautograms which are now held in the French academy of sciences, and had been there for 150 years without much interest or any idea of what to do with them.
The saga continues, in 2008 audiohistorian David Giovannoni found a pile of Phonautograms somewhere in the archive and decided to do something remarkable with them. He and his colleagues used visual scanning and specially developed software to turn the wiggly lines back into audio files to be listened to by anyone. He founded FirstSounds.org that focuses on those very first-ever recorded human sounds.
As someone with a drive for impeccable sound, I must clearly note the entirely Lo-Fi nature of the recordings, but, there is something outright remarkable in hearing a voice that was spoken and recorded without any hope of it ever being heard again.
While transporting the human voice and other sounds from 1853 to 2008 was an epic accomplishment, the inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville never quite managed to receive the attention and acclaim for his remarkable invention. He even wrote a book about the merits of his idea, but spent his swansong years as a small town librarian. Nonetheless, as a commercial proposition, his phonautograph device was of course doomed for failure for the complete and utter lack of a rather important feature: A playback button. It wasn't until 24 years later when Thomas Alva Edison with his ingenious ability to pick up on other people's (failed) work, finally introduced a functioning phonograph and managed to reap the fame and rewards that Scott was never able to do.
Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes audiophile quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time he blogs about all things related to sound, music and audio.
