First sound recording

First sound recording

Jean-Marie Constant Duhamel (1797-1872) discovered that a pen attached to a tuning fork would record its vibrations on a piece of paper, when the fork was struck. Thomas Young (1773-1829), in 1806, applied Duhamel's apparatus to a rotating cylinder coated with wax. Neither, of course, constituted the recording of sound in air, and neither was capable of reproduction. [Morton 2004]

A tuning fork, 1859

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (1817-79) deposited this "phonautogram" with the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle in 1859. The First Sounds group believe it to be a record made by a tuning fork vibrating at 435 Hz, then just adopted as the official French reference pitch. This is the oldest clearly recognizable sound yet reproduced and is presented here at successive stages of restoration. Though recorded in 1859, it was not possible to reproduce it until 2008.

Scott de Martinville's earliest experimental phonautograms from as early as 1853/4 still survive, but the sound content is too poor to reproduce. David Giovannoni, of First Sounds, has said that an 1857 recording of someone playing a scale on a cornet can still be made out, however. This recording does not appear to have been released to the public yet, although it was played at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections on 29 May 2009. Patrick Feaster has produced a comprehensive annotated discography of all Scott phonautograms currently known to exist. In this he is more cautious about the 1857 cornet recording—phonautogram 29, "Timbre du Cornet à piston"—saying 

. . . early investigation suggests that item 29 documents several eight-note sequences played on a cornet à piston between each of which Scott stopped the rotation of the cylinder. A repeated eight-note sequence is likely to be an ascending scale, and “correcting” the notes on that assumption does yield a plausible-sounding result.

The first sound recording, and the first of the human voice, that could be heard by contemporaries, was made by Thomas Edison (1847-1931). Although the chronology has frequently been presented in somewhat garbled form (often by Edison himself), the circumstances seem to have been established definitively in Randall Stross's 2007 biography of the inventor. Working late in the lab on 18 July 1877, comparing telephone diaphragms, Edison felt the vibrations as he spoke into one, and voiced his suggestion that, with a point on the diaphragm, it should be possible to make a recording while pulling something beneath it. With the assistance of John Kruesi and Charles Batchelor the experiment was rigged up there and then. Batchelor pulled a strip of wax paper through the device, while Edison spoke the standard phrase the lab used to test telephone diaphragms: "Mary had a little lamb." Playback was indistinct but audible, and by breakfast time the following morning they had achieved clear articulation from the waxed paper. The lab notebook for 18 July includes the brief entry:

Just tried experiment with a diaphragm having an embossing point & held against parafin paper moving rapidly the spkg vibrations are indented nicely & theres no doubt that I shall be able to store up & reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly

The entry written by Edison is also signed by Batchelor and James Adams, another assistant. It seems clear that Edison himself didn't immediately see the significance of what he had achieved, and it was not till 5 November 1877 that he set down on paper his conceptualisation of the tinfoil cylinder phonograph. The first actual working model was built by John Kruesi on 4 December 1877; the sentence "How do you get that?" is said to have been recorded and reproduced by that date.

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History holds three tinfoil recordings made by Thomas Edison. One is undated, but the other two date from 18 April 1878, when Edison demonstrated his recording machine to the National Academy of Sciences at a meeting held in the Smithsonian Institution Building, also known as the Smithsonian Castle. The exact content of the recordings is not known, however a report in the following day's Washington Star gives some idea. Edison had his assistant, Charles Batchelor, demonstrate the machine: "Into the mouthpiece of the instrument Mr. Edison's assistant sung and shouted and whistled and crowed, and in a few minutes the same sounds floated out upon the air faint but distinct." Then,

Just as the assistant was remarking in a bass voice to the phonograph on the subject of Uncle Ned that "he had gone wh—," the tin foil gave out and the line remained unfinished. One of the audience, not a member of the Academy, however, suggested that the line be completed by adding the words "where tin foil fuses."

[Stross; Washington Star; Morton 2000; email communications from the Smithsonian Institution, April 2011]

The Smithsonian recordings could presumably be reconstructed in the same way as has just been successfully undertaken with a tinfoil recording, made on 22 June 1878 in St Louis, Missouri, held by the Schenectady Museum, using non-contact scanning, to preserve the encoded sound and reproduce it in a digital format. Having made a three-dimensional scan of the entire surface of the tinfoil, software translated that virtual surface back into sound. The 78-second recording starts with a 23-second cornet solo, and is followed by a man—believed to be Thomas Mason, a St Louis political columnist—reciting 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and 'Old Mother Hubbard'; an unidentified woman says the words "Old Mother Hubbard". It was played in public on 25 October 2012 for the first time since it was created. [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Times Union, FoxNews, Huffington Post]

The earliest surviving sound recording (reproducible both at the time and currently) may be the lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock, 1878, made by Frank Lambert (1851-1937), but the evidence for its early date remains contentious. [Wichert, Cramer and Koenigsberg]

First digital sound recording

First recording of the human voice

"Au Clair de la Lune", 1860

Scott de Martinville recorded this on 9 April 1860, and deposited the results with the Académie des Sciences in 1861. The recording contains the first line of the second verse of this familiar song—"Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prête moi—" —and is the earliest audibly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered. The singer was Scott himself. [First Sounds] A photographic facsimile of the original phonautogram appears on p. 76 of Feaster, and online. Although the recording sounds unnaturally slow, Feaster suggests that this was "probably in order to create a record that would be visually easy to parse—although this is also the speed at which the song would have been sung as a lullaby."

Earlier phonautograms by Scott survive, in which it is evident that the human voice was recorded—the earliest, "Chant de la voix – changements de ton", dating from July 1857. However they lack timecodes, so it is impossible to speed-correct them, and the content is unintelligible. Feaster reproduces a photographic facsimile of the July 1857 phonautogram on p. 86, and the audio file for this too is included on the accompanying CD; the facsimile is also online.

Earliest-surviving recording of the female voice

In the 22 June 1878 recording above, an unidentified woman says the words "Old Mother Hubbard". This predates by ten years any other surviving recording of the female voice.

Earliest-born person whose voice was recorded

The Morning Call, of San Francisco, reported the following on 19 September 1891:

A CENTENARIAN'S VOICE.

Though Dead, It Rings Out Clear and

Distinct Through a Phonograph.

A Cleveland (O.) Leader reporter has had the unusual, not to say wierd, experience of hearing the voice of a man long since dead. The voice was that of Horatio Perry, a centenarian who passed away over a year ago, and it was reproduced perfectly through the agency of a phonograph. In January, 1890, Arthur Smith of this city visited Wellington, the home of Mr. Perry, taking a phonograph with him. It was suggested that the venerable gentleman talk into the instrument, and Mr. Smith readily assented. Mr. Perry was requested to relate an incident of his early life, and this is what he said into the mouthpiece of the phonograph: "I was born in 1790, and came to Cleveland in 1800. There was but one frame house in the village and my father purchased it. There was no road west of the Cuyahoga River and nothing there save woods— 'All the days of my life approach the end, and I wait until my change comes.'"

The last sentence is a Scriptural quotation that Mr. Perry greatly admired. Mr. Smith brought the cylinder used for Mr. Perry's voice to this city and locked it in his safe, where it has remained. Mr. Perry died not long after he spoke into the phonograph, and Mr. Smith professed to have a horror of hearing a dead man's voice, and he refrained from placing the cylinder in a phonograph until requested to do so by the reporter, who knew Mr. Perry. The voice was as natural as in life, and the pronunciation was clear.

The wax cylinder recording, made by the Ohio Phonograph Company of Cleveland, has since been lost. [The Birth of the Recording Industry]

Helmuth Karl Bernhard, Graf von Moltke (1800-1891)

The voice of Field Marshal von Moltke, b. 26 October 1800, was recorded on brown wax cylinder by Theo Wangemann—employed by Thomas Edison as in effect "the world's first professional sound recordist—on 21 October 1889, at Kreisau, Prussia.

Two recordings of von Moltke were first identified and digitized in 2011, at the Thomas Edison National Historic Park. Both recordings bear the same date, so the recording presented here is the one bearing the earlier of the sequential reference numbers, EDIS 93950. [NPS]

Earliest-born woman whose voice was recorded

According to Welch & Burt (1975), among the individuals recorded in England by George Gouraud was "actress Mrs. Stirling"; this must be Mary Anne (Fanny) Stirling (1815-1895), who had recently played Martha in Irving's 1885 production of Faust. It seems unlikely that the recording survives; the British Library Sound Archive does not have a copy.

A recording exists that has been attributed to Queen Victoria (1819-1901). Held by the British Library Sound Archive in London, very little of it is intelligible. On the basis of auditory information, the probability that this is a correct attribution is only 35%, though on the basis of documentary evidence of provenance it is put at 85%. Queen Victoria did make a sound recording on a separate occasion—on 8 August 1898 she recorded a message on a cylinder for Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia; but by her request it was broken into pieces after he had it played back. [British Library Sound Archive Catalogue, Tritton]

A strong contender may be Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), here recorded in 1890, in aid of the Light Brigade Relief Fund.

© 2010-2013 Benjamin S. Beck

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