Stories tagged Edison

The first recording of sound

by Gene on Mar. 28th, 2008

No, it wasn't Thomas Edison. Rather, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville developed a primitive sonogram -- a means of making a picture of sound -- nearly 20 years before Edison's phonograph. Unfortunately, de Martinville had no way of playing the sound back -- a rather serious limitation. Recently, however, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California programmed a computer to read the sonogram and reproduce the sound -- a mere 148 years after the picture was made. Edison still gets credit for the first machine to play recorded sound.