Did You Know? The First Recorded Human Voice Was Captured Decades Before Edison!

Scott de Martinville's 'phonautograph,' patented in 1857, was designed to study acoustics visually, etching sound waves onto paper without any intention for playback. It wasn't until 2008 that sound historians digitally reconstructed and played back one of his phonautograms, revealing a 10-second snippet of a French folk song, 'Au Clair de la Lune,' making it the oldest recognizable recording of the human voice in history, predating Edison's first clear recordings by nearly two decades.