Recent Syndics: Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville (April25, 1817 - April 26, 1879)

Scott de Martinville was a trade-printer. In 1854 he entered a realm of relentless thought concerning the mechanical transcription of the sounds of the human voice - speaking words and singing songs. During a proofreading of some physics texts, he stumbled onto a series of drawings of auditory anatomy. He began experimenting with trying to create a parallel mechanical device that would "hear" and then "record" what was heard. Thus, he substituted elastic mebrane for the tympanium, a series of levers for the ossicle, and these moved a stylus that would press onto paper, wood, or glass, covered with lampblack.

On January 26, 1857, he delivered his design in a sealed envelope to the French Academy. He received French Patent # 17.897/31,470 on march 25,1957. It was called "The Phonoautograph. It was attached to a horn to "collect" the sound, which in turn was attached to a diaphragm, which, it, in turn, vibrated a stiff bristle, which in turn, inscribed an image onto the lampblack coating on the turning cylinder's surface. The turning cylinder was hand-cranked.This device was built by the acoustic instrument maker Rudolph Koenig. It only created visual images of the sound. It did not "play-back" the sound. His device was then used for the sscientific investigation of sound waves.

Scott de Martinville sold several phonoautographs to scientists who were investigating the nature of sound itself. But that was about as far as things progressed. He spent the rest of his life working as a librarian and bookseller at 9 rue Vivienne, Paris, and mainting an ongoing interest in linguistics, people's names, and the characteristics of sound when used by humans. he published several papers on this subject.

His publications include:

Jugement d'un ouvrier sur les romans et les feuilletons à l'occasion de Ferrand et Mariette (1847)

Histoire de la sténographie depuis les temps anciens jusqu'à nos jours (1849)

Les Noms de baptême et les prénoms (1857)

Fixation graphique de la voix (1857)

Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Adolphe-Noël Desvergers
Essai de classification méthodique et synoptique des romans de chevalerie inédits et publiés. Premier appendice au catalogue raisonné des livres de la bibliothèque de M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot (1870)

Le Problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même. La France, l'Amérique (1878)

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

LISTEN HERE: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1860v2.mp3

“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.

Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.

“We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr. Giovannoni said.

But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk.