The Phonautograph
Sound recording before Edison
The history of sound recording was once thought to begin with Thomas Alva Edison’s phonograph of 1877. As with many of his inventions, Edison sketched out the idea, and gave it to his engineer, John Kruesi. Tests and improvements occupied most of the year, and the patent was finally filed in December. Legend has it that the first recording was of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” recited by Edison himself. Although Edison made later recordings of the same text, until quite recently we knew of no surviving recordings of any sound using the Edison system until more than a decade later, with the 1888 recordings of the Handel Festival at London’s Crystal Palace.
And yet, it turns out, there are actually sound recording which do survive from nearly 20 years earlier than Edison’s invention. These were made using the Phonautograph ( above) invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His device was not intended to permit the playback of sound; instead, using a sound-sensitive cone which etched its trace on paper coated with a fine layer of charcoal dust, the aim was to produce a visual record of sound. It was only in the twenty-first century that these visual traces were, with the aid of computer models, rendered back into audible sound, and even then there were glitches. The 1860 record of “Claire de Lune,” thought at first to be have been sung by a woman, turned out to have been recorded at a much lower pitch, and sung by Scott himself! He tested his device extensively tested over a period of years, and rumors have circulated circulate as to recordings of famous persons — Abraham Lincoln among them — having recorded a “phonautogram” That would indeed be a find.
The recovered Scott phonautograms are hosted at FirstSounds.org, which recently unveiled another, equally remarkable find. Although none of Edison’s earliest cylinders, which used tinfoil-coated paraffin, were in playable condition, in at least one case, the grooved tin covering, cracked and flattened and placed in a frame, still existed. But how to recover any sounds from it? Computer technology came to the rescue again, enabling a high-resolution 3-D model of the cracked tin surface, which could then be ‘virtually’ restored to its cylindrical shape, and “played” with a software needle.
The results are astonishing: made in 1881, the recording pushed the audible history of Edison’s machine back by seven years. The recording includes some lines from Hamlet (“there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy”) and a sort of peculiar, almost Dada-esque statement: “I am a Graphaphone, and my mother was a Phonograph.” And yet, even more than these, the recording’s most peculiar feature is a voiced trill, like the call of some exotic bird. Why is it there? My personal theory is that it was a kind of test tone; early recordists must have stumbled upon the fact that the Edison system was more responsive in the higher frequencies, and that the numerous sequential plosives of a trill translated particularly well onto a tinfoil-coated wax surface.
Since this flattened foil was recovered, a second, made in 1878 in St. Louis, has surfaced, and reclaimed the crown of the earliest Edison recording. This one turns out to be quite a bit longer, with its contents forming a sort of greatest hits of phonographic demonstration: it opens with a solo on a brass instrument, followed by a recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (the voice is probably not Edison’s), followed by some laughter, then “Old Mother Hubbard,” and then again by laughter and more speaking. Like the trilling on the 1881 recording, the laughter comes across more clearly than the speech.
