In 1860, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created what is now considered the oldest known recording of a human voice. His invention, the phonautograph, could capture sound waves as visual tracings on paper, but it had no method of playing them back as audio. As a result, Scott never heard the recording he made, which included the French song "Au Clair de la Lune." Only in 2008, 148 years later, did researchers digitally convert the tracings into sound, allowing people to hear the recording for the first time.
Previous Fact Next Fact