When Did Humans First Capture a Voice?

The earliest recognizable recording of a human voice was made in 1860, but nobody heard it until 2008.

French inventor Édouard Léon Scott de Martinville wanted to make sound visible. His phonautograph used a horn to direct sound toward a membrane. A bristle attached to the membrane scratched a moving line through soot spread across paper.

On April 9, 1860, the machine traced someone singing the French song Au Clair de la Lune. Scott had recorded the vibrations of a human voice seventeen years before Thomas Edison introduced his phonograph.

However, Scott did not design his machine to play sounds back. He imagined that people might learn to read the lines as they read written language. The fragile sheet entered an archive and remained silent for nearly a century and a half.

In 2008, researchers scanned the line without touching it and used computers to reconstruct the movement of the original membrane. From the soot emerged a brief, wavering voice from 1860.

The first recorded voice was therefore preserved before anyone possessed the means to hear it again. A machine had remembered a sound that its own inventor believed could only be seen.