Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

Tree131 writes "The New York Times is reporting that sound recordings pre-dating Edison's made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, were discovered by American audio historians at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. The archives are on paper and were meant for recording but not playback. Researchers used a high quality scan of the recording and an electronic needle to play back the sounds recorded 150 years ago. '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.'"

Comments

Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Edison sounds like a modern day Microsoft.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Ethanol-fueled]

I guess Tesla/Westinghouse would be analogous to the Open source movement, then. Note that, in the end, AC prevailed. Go Tesla!

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[calebt3]

Not really. Edison was able to play his recordings, which this Frenchman apparently wasn't able to do.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave it to the French to invent write only memory.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[sm62704]

He is no longer the father of sound recording, but his WAS the first to play sound back.

The inventer of this device never indended it for playback. What good is a recording that can't be played back?

I don't know of any useless thing Microsoft has picked up and made useful. I also don't see anywhere that it says Edison ever heard of this guy.

Also, Edison was already not the father of modern sound recording. Modern sound recordings are digital.

-mcgrew

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Ethanol-fueled]

I thought that write-only memory was a Polish invention, like rasin juice and metal skateboard wheels.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[dcsmith]

Note that, in the end, AC prevailed.

Blast it, don't encourage the Anonymous Cowards!

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[wattrlz]

It should also be noted that the intention of, "this Frenchman" was not to play back his recordings, but to develop an automatic method of transcribing speech. TFA states:

In a self-published memoir in 1878, [Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville] railed against Edison for "appropriating" his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but "writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means."

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Ucklak]

Damn, when I was a kid, roller skates and skateboards were only metal.
We also had strap on skate wheels that were also metal.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[ShieldW0lf]

People born before us were not nearly as stupid and primitive as we are led to believe they were, and we are not as brilliant and sophisticated as we think we are.

We think these clever people are scarce rarities because we have been brainwashed to think they are. In reality, the accumulated knowledge we think is so precious is actually rather obvious, and has been lost and re-discovered again and again and again.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[secolactico]

Yeah, but fire's been invented since.

Kidding, I saw those strap on wheels as a kid. Never had one, tho. I couldn't, for the life of me, learn to skate.

Damn whippersnappers, get off my lawn!

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[multisync]

We also had strap on skate wheels that were also metal.

I remember those, you wore them over your sneakers, and tightened the metal clamps around your feet with a key. The vibration of metal on pavement would cause numbing foot paralysis within minutes.

And do you think it would ever occur to our parents to put a helmet or shin pads on us? Apparently we were expendable back then.

Oh well, /OT Rant

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, the RIAA is looking for a senator to sponsor a bill to get these paper recordings added to their collection of copyrighted media.

Any senators out there want to sponsor the We Want To Own Everything Every Said, Sung or Hummed Bull?

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Ucklak]

Only helmets available back then were the heavy bowling ball type of motorcycle helmets.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Rei]

Yeah, it's great that we're just now rediscovering genetic engineering, nuclear reactors, CIGS cells, multicore processors, carbon nanotubes, and satellite communications. We know that the Romans did all of these things thousands of years ago.

Yes, some people in historic times did some really darned impressive things, long before we would have thought they would have. No, most of our modern knowledge has not been "lost and rediscovered again and again and again."

Back on the original topic: I think it's perfectly reasonable that some day we might be able to recover even older sounds. And perhaps images.

Sound:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/02w307324378k4jm/

"A theoretical model of the acoustic effect of crystallization is suggested based on the representation of a stepwise character of formation or disappearance of macrolayers and macroregions on a growing (or melting) surface. According to this model, the picture of oscillations reproduces in basic features the form of the signals observed in experiments. The oscillation frequency of the liquid is determined by the frequency of generation of jumps at the crystallization front, while the comparatively large values of peak pressures in acoustic waves are a consequence of the resonance phenomena."

Translation: crystallizing materials (cooling molten metals, cooling glasses, drying out of sugars and salts, all sorts of things you can picture remaining from an ancient environment) can leave traces of acoustic vibrations that were passing through them when they were cooling in their crystal structure. Meaning that we could potentially recover them. I don't know how widely applicable this technique is, but it certainly seems possible.

Images:

Many materials, both natural and manmade, suffer photodegradation. This is a process in which sunlight excites certain compounds and creates free radicals inside the material, which then, catalytically or not, damage the material from its original state. It seems quite possible to me that holographic information related to what frequencies of light struck where at what angles (and potentially even at what periods of time) could be restored by doing a detailed layer-by-layer atomic scale inspection of the material in question. Certainly I would expect poor temporal resolution (if any at all), but say, if you had an artifact that was in a single room for most of its existance, and then ended up buried with no further exposure to light, perhaps you could reconstruct the average appearance of the room.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[afabbro]

The inventer of this device never indended it for playback. What good is a recording that can't be played back?

I just recorded an entire immersive virtual world simulation of Ancient Rome on a single Cheerio and have it here at my desk. It's only intended for recording, though - you can't play it back.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Fifth Earth]

On the other hand, he failed miserably at this goal, because nobody can read sound waves. He may have incidentally made the first steps towards sound recording, but frankly his personal invention was totally useless. It took 150 years of advancement to sneak in the back door and get anything useful at all out of his technology, and by that point massive advancements in sound recording, as well as speech-to-text technology that actually works, had both already been invented.

It sounds a bit like Niecpe's first photograph, except even more so. Niecpe's method made a photograph in 1826, but the exposure time was 8 hours and it couldn't be reproduced (no negative). The difference is that in Niepce's case, at least he produced a recognizable image, wheras all Scott managed was some indecipherable (until seriously modern technology came along) squiggly lines on a piece of paper.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[zullnero]

"Microsoft?"

Nope. It's highly doubtful that Edison had even heard of Martinville or his recordings. After all, most folks had no idea about anything he did even in modern times. However, with Microsoft, it's simple...some developer gets hired, uses a software tool or data structure he likes. He tells his colleagues about it. Then someone at Microsoft gets the idea of patenting it.

If you created an application, sold it, got rich and famous, then after your death it turned out that someone had written a similar app that was almost as good but the author couldn't get it working completely and scrapped it...THAT would be a good comparison.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[mtgarden]

How so? I just finished reading Edison and the Electric Chair. I did not know much about Edison or Westinghouse (and Tesla only made brief appearances).

A major point that I came away with was this: Edison was a bit unethical; Westinghouse made Edison look saintly. Edison would manipulate public opinion, but Westinghouse lied, bribed and disregarded the public to make headway against Edison Electric.

Both men did great things and invented useful technology. Neither was a shining example of ethics. But, lets remember that Edison was not accused of bribing the entire New York State Legislature or NYC officials or just about everyone in sight. Nor did Edison disregard the safety of people. Westinghouse blew off safety concerns and consequently many people died.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[camg188]

Exactly. This French phonautogram is analagous to visualizations in WinAmp where Edison's recordings would be analagous to the MP3 file.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[kestasjk]

People born before us were not nearly as stupid and primitive as we are led to believe they were, and we are not as brilliant and sophisticated as we think we are. Who's "we"? A bit of a revealing post..

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[bradinthehouse]

From TFA it sounds as if the Frenchman ( a typesetter ) had no intention of his "phono graph" being played back. He wanted to document his speech visually. Edison, on the other hand, intended to be able to play his speech back.
Edison still gets the credit for playing back sound, but it seems as if our typesetter friend gets the credit for the first recorded sound.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if nobody could decipher it until recently. If someone creates a working Grand Unified Theory but dies before they explains their notes and it takes 50 years to decipher them... does that mean the theory was invalid? Its easy to dismiss inventions for some arbitrary reason if it doesn't fit within your parameters but it doesn't change the fact that recordings were made that did work.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least Bill Gates didn't electrocute people's pets.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[mea37]

Yes, but what that really means is that he got locked into an assumption about what the technology was "for" and failed to see that sound reproduction (1) was more useful even in those applications where automatic transcription might have a purpose, and (2) could also be put to other applications.

Ever heard it said that having an idea and/or technical skill is only a small part of what is required to successfully invent? Ever wonder why?

Edison had the vision to advance from a neat trick to a practically useful invention, even in the face of opposition from others in the field; he deserves the credit he got.

de Martinville deserves to be referenced as a footnote for the advances he made (but whose real value he failed to see).

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[RDW]

'Translation: crystallizing materials (cooling molten metals, cooling glasses, drying out of sugars and salts, all sorts of things you can picture remaining from an ancient environment) can leave traces of acoustic vibrations that were passing through them when they were cooling in their crystal structure. Meaning that we could potentially recover them. I don't know how widely applicable this technique is, but it certainly seems possible.'

Interestingly, recovery of sounds 'recorded' by various accidental mechanisms (e.g. in the grooves of a clay pot) has been the subject of semi-serious speculation, a well-known hoax, several SF stories, an episode of the X-files, and even some published but highly dubious research:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.html

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[wattrlz]

If someone creates a cookie recipe that happens to, in several dozen years time, be interpretable as a Grand Unified Theory then there might be some gray area. If they vehemently decry any attempt at such a theory as an egregious misapplication of culinary knowledge even though they have yet to create a single edible confection, I should think it at least requires a historical footnote with any recognition they receive.

More importantly, though; "Thomas Alva Edison" is so much easier to write than, "Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville". Think of all the trees and ink we'd save!

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[triffid_98]

I remember those, I even had one with the cheaper wooden wheels at one point.

We certainly had fire, since I got to play with OMG *real* fireworks as a kid. We had lead in our paint and asbestos in our floor tiles and we liked it.

You know, before we invented lawyers and decided toasters needed labels saying 'do not immerse in water'.

Damn, when I was a kid, roller skates and skateboards were only metal. We also had strap on skate wheels that were also metal.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[chrispalasz]

People born before us were not nearly as stupid and primitive as we are led to believe they were,

Well first of all... who is "we"? How are we led to believe that people born before us were stupid and primitive? I don't think that's ever been true... ever; and I've never believed that myself. For just one of many, many examples: Aristotle. Who hasn't heard of him or who doesn't know his profession? Your statement is just unfounded, as far as I can see; but if you have something to back it up I'd really like to check it out.

and we are not as brilliant and sophisticated as we think we are.

Again, please clarify - who is "we"? I would again claim the contrary. I think people born today absolutely are as brilliant and sophisticated as I think they are. Stephen Hawking? Richard Feynman? (two examples that I personally highly respect) - We're living in an age of exponentially increasing sophistication and efficiency of technology; but I don't think many people forget that the people who came before us are the ones that got us to where we are today - for the same reason most people know that if they went back to a time before this technology existed, they wouldn't have too much to offer our ancestors (compared to where we sit today). Our knowledge is built upon the knowledge and discoveries of others.

We think these clever people are scarce rarities because we have been brainwashed to think they are. In reality, the accumulated knowledge we think is so precious is actually rather obvious, and has been lost and re-discovered again and again and again.

How have "we" been brainwashed? How is the accumulated knowledge that we have today even remotely "rather obvious"? Please explain, and don't forget that you used the word "accumulated" - so you can't start with something as basic as the shape of the earth (which has, in fact, been discovered, lost, and rediscovered a number of times in history).

No, the accumulation of knowledge we have today goes exceedingly beyond the level of knowledge people had a few hundred years ago; and the same was true a couple hundred years ago as compared to hundreds of years before that.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[westlake]

It should also be noted that the intention of, "this Frenchman" was not to play back his recordings, but to develop an automatic method of transcribing speech.

I believe Bell was also interested in "transcribing speech" - interested in developing tools that would help him in understanding the mechanisms of speech and teaching speech to the deaf.

The successful inventor is both imaginative and opportunistic. Bell senses the path which leads to the telephone. Edison sees the markers that point towards the phonograph.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh... for a moment, I thought this was about Edison Chen and his video and photo recordings.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[ElizabethGreene]

Can we give one of those to the clumsy guy that dropped and broke the priceless Edison wax cylinder recording on ZDnet tv?

-ellie

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[kalirion]

Yeah, it's great that we're just now rediscovering genetic engineering, nuclear reactors, CIGS cells, multicore processors, carbon nanotubes, and satellite communications. We know that the Romans did all of these things thousands of years ago.

Not Romans, but the aliens Xenu dumped into the volcano. Now their souls are slowly uploading their knowledge into our heads.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Hatta]

Speaking of digital sound recordings, where's the mp3? Or a wav even? I want to hear this 150yo recording.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Rei]

Mythbusters throughly busted the clay pot approach, though. If there was any signal to begin with, it gets completely lost in the noise of the grainy surface.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Anonymous Coward]

and this comes from someone who has DC in his initials.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[cheater512]

Of course the Romans didnt have computers and nuclear energy.

It was the Atlantians who had that stuff.
I even heard they had 1024 core computers with terrabytes of ram! ;)

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[4D6963]

This French phonautogram is analagous to visualizations in WinAmp where Edison's recordings would be analagous to the MP3 file.

Bad analogy. More as if de Martinville invented a sound spectrograph (which actually exists since the late 1930s) and Edison invented something to play back spectrographs (which only has been really done since the 1990s it seems). It doesn't diminish Edison's merit though.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[LoRdTAW]

You also forgot the solar powered flashlight.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[4D6963]

he failed miserably at this goal, because nobody can read sound waves.

I think you're missing the point of his invention. Back in 1857, scientists had no other means to visualise sound waves. Therefore a tool that allows you to see sound waves can be of great use, and not only can you use it to better understand sounds but also to study it mathematically (because such an instrument allows you to quantify sounds acoustic phenomenons) and also do some practical things out of it, like for example timing with precision certain sounds (like an echo for example), or even estimating the frequency of certain sounds (you'll need such an instrument if you want to count how many times a second a fly beats its wings).

So yes, it had little practical interest for the general public before playback was possible, just like radioactivity had little interest in the time of Pierre and Marie Curie. Such inventions often find a scientific use a long time before they become interesting to the general public.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[scottrocket]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautogram#The_phonautograph/ Poor quality, but interesting.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[shoor]

I can remember watching an episode of the TV program "Science Fiction Theater" (look it up in the IMDB) back in the 1950s in which some scientists recovered a rock, and were able to extract the sounds of people in a panic running from the Mt Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii. (I don't remember many details though, I was pretty young at the time.)

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[ross.w]

...and the helicopter ejection seat

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[K8Fan]

Not really. Edison was able to play his recordings, which this Frenchman apparently wasn't able to do.

Not unlike John Logie Baird, the Scotsman who invented television before Zworkin or Farnsworth. He invented video recording, but was never able to play his recordings back. But recently these recordings have been digitized and the time base has been corrected, and video is there.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was the episode called "The Frozen Sound"? Originally Aired 7/30/1955 -- A Summary:

THE FROZEN SOUND Voices from 2000 years ago and wire taps without wires confront research scientists. and/or Enemy espionage obtains a record of a physicist's top-secret conversation with the Secretary of Defense in a completely sealed room. The secret of the leak lies in a bottle of ant poison containing a mysterious crystal -- a crystal with the power to record entire conversations! Marshall Thompson, Marilyn Erskin, Ray Collins, Michael Fox.

Here's another TV listing.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[dintech]

Well observed. Also note that when he submits a post he has an AC/DC check box. Not many people can claim that!

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[dreamchaser]

I even heard they had 1024 core computers with terrabytes of ram! ;)

That was just on their PDA's!

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[bilgebag]

BBC radio 4 newsreader Charlotte Green can be heard trying to contain her amusement when the clip was played this morning, here

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[jwo7777777]

Do you come from a land down under?

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[agbinfo]

but his WAS the first to play sound back.

Playback didn't need to be invented.

Echo is a natural phenomenon that will playback sound for you.

I think I'll go remove the entry for Edison in Wikipedia; He's no longer relevant.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[RockDoctor]

You know, before we invented lawyers and decided toasters needed labels saying 'do not immerse in water'.

Sounds good advice to me - I hate soggy toast.

(this afternoon's risk assessment was - should we stow the container of fuming nitric acid next to the container of lithium metal, or should we put them on opposite sides of the deck. Hmmm, hard choice. It sounds likely to be an interesting bang. But no soggy toast, please.)

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[bandmassa]

The french system only recorded and he hadn't come up with a method to play back, therefore the job's only half done, So Edison's still the first to make a useful system - can't take that away from him.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[ross.w]

As a matter of fact, I do.

But the vegemite sandwich won't be necessary.

Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[eldavojohn]

Well, time to add another to the list.

Remember, if you want to be a scientist, you just have to be smart. If you want to be a well-known-until-the-end-of-time scientist, you have to be smart and suffer from at least a little megalomania (see the war of currents or Einstein's failure to accept quantum theory).

I'm still shocked fewer people don't realize Leibniz beat Newton to Calculus. Oh well, great disputes make for great reading.

Oh well, one could spend countless hours recalling the great debates of science, it's a shame that some of them are about who's name goes in the history books. Strangely, ingenuity & legacy complexes seem to go hand in hand. I'm saddened to think that there may be others buried in history by ultra competitive researchers.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[MrKevvy]

I am surprised that your list doesn't contain Edwin Howard Armstrong. I suggest the book "Man of High Fidelity" if you can find it. Like Tesla, he was a brilliant electrical engineer, inventing many of the circuits essential to radio (and he invented FM) but others stole the credit and patents from him throughout his life, culminating in his suicide in 1954.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[Anonymous Coward]

Leibniz was working on calculus the same time as Newton. The difference was Newton kept it to himself for too long because he was making money out of using it on peoples' problems. Still, most people outside of physics use Leibniz's notation rather than Newton's dots.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[netsavior]

Strangely, ingenuity & legacy complexes seem to go hand in hand. I'm saddened to think that there may be others buried in history by ultra competitive researchers.

I think part of being a truely meaningful innovator in history is getting people to notice. Jim Bob may have cold fusion running in his basement but unless he tells people AND gets them to listen, it is merely one man who benefits and not the entire human race. People who seek credit and glory are the ones who do the hard work of bring science into the limelight and they are the ones who deserve the praise imo. 1000 people could have invented the light bulb, movie camera, sound recording, etc but it was edison's patent obsession and money/glory seeking behavior that really pushed his "inventions" into every day appliances for the advancement of mankind.

I have a pollution free, non-horsepower robbing, solid state air conditioner installed in my classic car, but I am not doing shit for our economy/environment/technology because I am too lazy to market, patent, and profit off of my own invention.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[WK2]

Apparently, it also helps to have an easy to pronounce name. Einstein/Edison/Newton vs Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville/Leibniz.

Also, it isn't fair to Einstein to say he "failed" to accept quantum theory. He was one of the few to see it for what it was, and never tried to accept it.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm still shocked fewer people don't realize Leibniz beat Newton to Calculus."

Because he did not. Leibniz published first. His is a fair better presentation too; Leibniz' notation is used today.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[gravis777]

I'm still shocked fewer people don't realize Leibniz beat Newton to Calculus [wikipedia.org]. Oh well, great disputes make for great reading. Actaully, not only did I not know this, but am quite surprised that Calculus is not quite older.

Oh well, one could spend countless hours recalling the great debates of science, it's a shame that some of them are about who's name goes in the history books. I think the issue here is to not just discover or invent something, but to find a real-world solution and market it, and to have it generally accepted as true, or useful, or whatever. Lets look at a quite modern example. Most of us here on slashdot will credit Xerox with inventing the Graphic User Interface. However, you would be surprised at how many people blame Microsoft for stealing the idea from Apple, and crediting Apple with its creation. Xerox never marketed it. Apple did. I am sure many people will also credit Apple with creating the first MP3 player, be that untrue. Who will you credit with creating the mouse? I am sure its not these guys, unless you are a true geek. Who do you credit with creating the first television, the person who created the first CRT, or Marconi for his work in radio, or the company who first marketed it? Who do you credit with inventing the compact disc, the person who came up with cutting grooves in a polymer, the person who invented the laser, the person who came up with the idea of reading a disc with a laser, the person who came up with the idea of converting analog sounds to digital?

Edison, while he may not have been the first, did actually play back his recording, and market it.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[ZFox]

I have a pollution free, non-horsepower robbing, solid state air conditioner installed in my classic car Is it a block of ice?

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[camg188]

Who do you credit with creating the first television

Professor Farnsworth. (Yes, he was a real person.)

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[arodland]

Right, because Leibniz wasn't the least bit overbearing himself.

As to QM, I'm still waiting for something better to come along and replace it. It's too ugly to be true. You can't fault Einstein for thinking the same.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[netsavior]

I know you are being smartass, but no... most methods of making ice require refrigerant, my system does not.

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[LihTox]

How is Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics megalomania? Einstein made some of the foundational discoveries of Quantum Mechanics, so if he was out to toot his own horn he would have embraced them. He just had a strongly held belief that QM was wrong: is believing strongly in something megalomania?

Re:Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that someone else disputed the conception of Gauss as underappreciated on
your journal entry, but let me add another voice. How can a person that appears
on every short list of possible greatest mathematicians ever be underappreciated?

Awesome

[seanadams.com]

I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back. I think it's just spectacular that we are able to do so 150 years later.

But give credit where it's due... Edison not only transferred sound to physical media - he played it back too.

Re:Awesome

[Ritchie70]

If you read the article, he was interested in archiving of the sound for purposes of later analysis of the written result, not for playback. Given his apparent resentment of Edison, this may be a claim (in my opinion, not the article's) that didn't actually reflect reality.

The similarity in means between Edison and Edouard-Leon is due to the technology of the time with respect to sound more than to a similar goal. In both, a coneis used to capture sound waves and translate them into physical movement of a stylus. In one case, the stylus creates marks on paper; in another, it creates varying grooves in a wax medium.

It was Edison's use of a medium that preserved the movement of the stylus in a way that could be made to easily cause another stylus to move that gave him the ability to play back the sound. If the largely mechanical technology of the time had a way to follow the written marks and translate them back into motion then Edouard-Leon could have played it back as well.

Re:Awesome

[Scrameustache]

I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back. I think it's just spectacular that we are able to do so 150 years later.

But give credit where it's due... Edison not only transferred sound to physical media - he played it back too. The earliest known invention of a phonographic recording device was the phonautograph, invented by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and patented on March 25, 1857. It could transcribe sound to a visible medium, but had no means to play back the sound after it was recorded.

It was a scientific device, meant to study sound waves.

Edison modified it for playback, and made his fortune. [time passed] Then he electrocuted an elephant to FUD alternating current technology.
He was the Bill Gates of the 19th/20th century. Same morals, same amount of inventing.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry. Gates isn't worthy to lick Edison's boots in terms of actually inventing things. What's the big deal about electrocuting an elephant?

Re:Awesome

[zippthorne]

They had photography, and all that entails. I'm sure that he could've created a crude mask and acid-etched the image onto a sturdier material. But it's certainly more convoluted than simply recording grooves directly in the first place.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back. according to the article, he didn't. because he didn't want to. as a typographer, he thought that the visual representation of the sound was the best final result... presumably he thought people would someday be able to read these waveforms.

Re:Awesome

[mtgarden]

Hmmm. Evidence would indicate that Edison actually feared AC. Long before the AC v DC wars with Westinghouse, Edison was on record as saying that AC was to dangerous to use. And, given the poor insulation and low safety standards of the day, he was correct. Many more people died from accidental contact with AC then ever from DC.

Re:Awesome

[westlake]

I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back

But he wasn't trying to playback the sound. He was trying to read the graph as he would read a printed text or a stenographer's notes.

Re:Awesome

[Scrameustache]

Hmmm. Evidence would indicate that Edison actually feared AC. Do you know what the "F" in "FUD" stands for?

Re:Awesome

[mtgarden]

Yup. My point was that his Fear was rational. People died accidentally. He wasn't really over exaggerating. One guy was fried in public at lunch time on a telegraph pole due to AC. Edison encouraged the legitimate fear for financial gain, but the fear was real.

Analogy: Apple encourages people to migrate from Microsoft to avoid ID stealing virii. Is Apple correct that most ID stealing virii affect MS products? Sure. Is that spreading FUD? Probably, but no different than Edison.

No offense meant to you. I'm just a bit opinionated as I just finished reading about all of this.... :-)

Re:Awesome

[westlake]

It was a scientific device, meant to study sound waves.
Edison modified it for playback, and made his fortune. [time passed] Then he electrocuted an elephant to FUD alternating current technology. He was the Bill Gates of the 19th/20th century. Same morals, same amount of inventing.

The story makes no connection between Scott and Edison. The graph was unreadable for 150 years - only a tiny fragment is intelligible now.

Edison had a career in invention which spanned close to ninety years.

It has been said that Edison's greatest invention was the corporate research lab. He was in the business of invention. The products which emerged from his lab provide many of the iconic images of the twentieth century.

The slash at Bill Gates is a cheap shot.

Gates was there in the beginning with the Altair.

The TRS 100 is the laptop computer pretty much as we know it now,

It wasn't CP/M, the Commodore 64, the Apple II or the Mac that brought the PC into every home and office. It was the IBM PC clone running MSDOS and Windows.

The Geek will never forgive Gates for that --- even as he builds his dirt-cheap Linux PC from the commodity parts designed and produced for the Windows market.

In that sense he is no different from his mechanically inclined ancestor who despised Henry Ford for shifting the focus of the auto industry from the handcrafted Locomobiles and Stanley Steamers of an earlier day to the mundanely mass-produced Chevy and Ford V-8.

Re:Awesome

[Scrameustache]

Edison's greatest invention was Edison was a business man, who dealt with technology, just as Gates is a business man who deals with software.

Re:Awesome

[maxwell demon]

It wasn't CP/M, the Commodore 64, the Apple II or the Mac that brought the PC into every home and office. It was the IBM PC clone running MSDOS and Windows.

The key word here is "IBM PC clone" - at that time IBM was the company, so the PC could sell just from having the name IBM on it, and the clones, while not really being IBM, got the bonus indirectly by being "IBM compatible", while at the same time bringing down the price to own an "IBM" PC. It wasn't Microsoft who brought computing to every home. It was IBM and the companies building IBM PC clones.

Re:Awesome

[westlake]

It wasn't Microsoft who brought computing to every home. It was IBM and the companies building IBM PC clones.

The IBM PC clone needed to run IBM PC software. MS-DOS retail list cost $200 less than C/PM 86.

There was never any serious doubt that Microsoft would be a major player in the evolution of the IBM PC market - no matter who got the contract for the OS.

Uh, pointless...

[Anonymous Coward]

What good is recording without playback? I don't even consider that to be worthwhile. Sure it's a step forward in terms of "pure science", but what kind of utility would that have?

Pure science breakthroughs are good, but the ones with utility (correctly, IMHO) are the ones that deserve to be put in the history books.

Re:Uh, pointless...

[calebt3]

What good is recording without playback? None whatsoever. But it is hard to play something back until you have figured out how to record. He just hadn't figured out that step yet.

Re:Uh, pointless...

[Oligonicella]

No, he didn't figure out that step. It's not like he's alive and still trying.

Re:Uh, pointless...

[TheSHAD0W]

Pure science WAS the point. This was one of the ways they discovered what sound actually was. The ability to play these old recordings back is neat, but beside the point.

Re:Uh, pointless...

[mollymoo]

It's only pointless if you think of it as a recording machine designed for playback rather than one designed for analysis. Seismographs use similar technology to this day - thing vibrates, pen records vibrations. I'd hope you wouldn't call the recordings they produce pointless because we don't have the technology to recreate a quake.

Re:Uh, pointless...

[Bob-taro]

What good is recording without playback?

FTA:

Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for "appropriating" his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but "writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means."

Visually capturing the sound would theoretically give you more information than a stenographer could record - tone of voice, for example. It would also mean the stenographer wouldn't have to keep up in real time, because they could just analyze the recording later. However, I sure wouldn't want to be the one tasked with "reading" the recording.

Re:Uh, pointless...

[zygotic mitosis]

Give me three more years..

Re:Uh, pointless...

[camg188]

What good is recording without playback

Analysis.

And the first words were ...

[trolltalk.com]

researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman

"I surrender!"

Re:And the first words were ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What, not "premier post" ?

Re:And the first words were ...

[wall0159]

did you make up your username just for that comment?

Re:And the first words were ...

[trolltalk.com]

did you make up your username just for that comment?

No - the domain was abandonned for almost a year when I looked it up for the hell of it, so I scooped it up.

Re:And the first words were ...

[Valdrax]

Indeed. And the first 874 posts in his posting history were all leading up to this one crowning moment of glory.

Re:And the first words were ...

[mcmaddog]

I think the phrase the French use is "We are betrayed!"

Flight?

[Spazmania]

Wasn't there also a Frenchman whose flight predated the Wright Brothers? I seem to remember that the key difference was the Wright Brothers got the whole process to work.

Re:Flight?

[Notquitecajun]

IOW, the French guy "crashed his plane."

Re:Flight?

[underpants_gnome]

I don't know about "before" the Wright Brothers, but there is the well known case of Santos' Dumont flight in Paris. The key difference to the Wright Flyer was the take-off process. His plane (the 14 Bis) had an engine, or in other words, was self-powered and could sustain flight. That's why many people (outside the US of course =P) consider Santos Dumont's invention the "first real airplane".

Re:Flight?

[glgraca]

Another important difference is that the Wright brother's flight was witnessed only by themselves and their crew whereas Dummont's flight was a very public event.

Re:Flight?

[camperdave]

The Montgolfier Brothers took to the air almost a full century before the Wright brothers were even born. Mind you, that was in a hot air balloon.

Re:Flight?

[Anonymous Coward]

[French Brothers] took to the air almost a full century before the Wright brothers . . . in a hot air balloon. Hmmm... sounds about right.

Re:Flight?

[Thomasje]

According to this, the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft took place in 1874, in a plane built and flown by Félix du Temple, a Frenchman. Another pre-Wright brothers flight was achieved by Gustave Whitehead, a German-American, in 1901.

The Wright brothers are generally credited with designing and building the first practical planes; the key to their success was the invention of ailerons, which allow the pilot to control the plane's roll (rotation on its front-to-rear axis). Other designs were unstable in this regard; with ailerons, you can keep a plane upright even if wind or some other effect tries to blow it on its side. The Wright brothers deserve full credit for figuring out how to build and operate a truly controllable plane, but it is still a shame that many history books overlook their predecessors... Kitty Hawk was not the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft.

Re:Flight?

[Anonymous Coward]

He was not French, he was Brazilian and his name was Alberto Santos Dumont. He spent most of his life in Paris, though.
He was responsible for the first well-documented flight by a vehicle "heavy than air" with his 14-Bis airplane.
But the way modern airplanes came out resembles more to the way the Wright Bros designed theirs.
Santos Dumont planes were more like Ultralight Planes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_aviation.

Re:Flight?

[superdave80]

"The key difference to the Wright Flyer was the take-off process. His plane (the 14 Bis) had an engine"

Um, so what are the propellers in this picture attached to? http://www.old-picture.com/wright-brothers/pictures/Wright-Brothers-Airplane-001.jpg

And his flight was three years after the Wright Brothers. (1903 vs. 1906) Dumont supporters cling to the fact that the Wright Brothers had a headwind at takeoff to justify their claim that he, and not the Wright Brothers, was the first to fly a real airplane. Pretty weak argument if you ask me.

Re:Flight?

[JoeD]

That would be Alberto Santos-Dumont.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont

His plane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14-bis

Be sure to read the comparing the 14-bis to the Wright flyer. If you tack on enough qualifiers, you can make anything be the "first", but as the article mentions, the Wrights had a plane that flew for 20 miles a full year before the 14-bis made its first hop.

Re:Flight?

[AlHunt]

Well, I guess I'm obliged to mention Richard Pearse http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/pearse1.html, the famous Kiwi who could have claimed first flight, but didn't. It seems Mr. Pearse managed to land in some shrubbery a couple of times and had other problems. *He* didn't consider his flights successful, but most Kiwis will defend his record to the death.

Re:Flight?

[jandrese]

Actually, ailerons were a French invention (hence the French word) that predated the Wright flyer by several years. The Wrights however did not use ailerons (which were a poor choice on the flimsy wire and cloth designs used in the day anyway, as the wing would tend to flex in the opposite direction when the ailerons were used). The Wrights used a wing warping system instead. The Wrights weren't the first to get up in the air with a heavier than air craft, but they were the first to understand that control was the most important aspect of the whole thing. The Wright flyer was considered the first modern aircraft because it was the first that could fly without crashing (a vast improvement over all of the guys before them). Their aircraft had plenty of other problems (poor yaw control at low speed because the elevators were in front of the engine for one, not enough power to take off without catapult assistance or a headwind), but they got it right where it mattered, in keeping the plane controllable in the air and able to be landed safely.

There is an anecdote of the Wrights taking a ship over to France to show off their invention to the French aeronautical society. They set the flyer up, took off, make one perfect circle around the field, and then landed again. The head of the French society wrote "Gentlemen, we have been beaten", but this inspired the members of the club to try even harder to get their designs working.

Re:Flight?

[FingerDemon]

I did hear some controversy about a guy (I believe he was in Brazil) that flew his plane before the Wright Brothers and is celebrated as the "father of flight" in Brazil. But I always thought the real triumph of the Wright Brothers wasn't building the plane or flying it, but understanding how the aerodynamics gave the wings lift. That made it possible to really reproduce working planes and experiment with new designs and improve powered flight. Everybody prior to that seemed to be doing trial and error based on studies of bird's wings.

Of course, I could be wrong. I am no expert on aviation history. Although, I have visited Kitty Hawk as a tourist and I think I stayed that night in a Holiday Inn Express.

Re:Flight?

[arth1]

By any sane definition of "manned powered flight", several others preceded the Wright brothers. Richard Pearse is the most obvious example, with a plane that had both ailerons and landing wheels, could do turns in the air, and flew several times the distance of the Kitty Hawk flights. It's rather telling that the Americans have had to change the definition of manned powered flight several times to include the Wright brothers and exclude others. The latest "definition" now includes "pre-announced flight", with the wording tailored to exclude Mr. Pearse.

What the Wright brothers had was media connections and a wish to be in the limelight. And, they were American.

What does this have to do with Edison and his phonograph? Plenty. Edison, like many other people known to be pioneers were in reality copycats who profited on being the first to MARKET something.
And Edison wasn't even the inventor at Menlo Park who came up with the phongraph -- that was the now forgotten misters Kruesi and Batchelor ("borrowing" the idea from the Frenchman Charles Cros). Edison was their boss, and took the honours (and patents) for himself, in good old capitalist fashion. It's a shame that it's his name that's remembere, when all he was was a ruthless businessman exploiting other people's inventions.

Re:Flight?

[gelfling]

No a Brazilian; Santos-Dumont

Re:Flight?

[Trogre]

I don't know about a Frenchman, but there was once a (nearly) flying Kiwi.

Re:Flight?

[westlake]

Another important difference is that the Wright brother's flight was witnessed only by themselves and their crew whereas Dummont's flight was a very public event.

There were witnesses. The Wrights' first flight is one of the iconic photographs of the twentieth century. The Wrights believed from the beginning that the fundamental problem of flight was control in three dimensions.

Re:Flight?

[realkiwi]

Well there was also a New Zealander who flew before the Wrights but at that time it took news 6 months to arrive from New Zealand by sailing ship.

Re:Flight?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Well there was also a New Zealander who flew before the Wrights but at that time it took news 6 months to arrive from New Zealand by sailing ship. That would be Richard Pearse, of Waitohi Flat, Temuka, New Zealand.

"Richard Pearse: "Mad Pearse", "Bamboo Dick", self-taught inventor, prophetic designer, trail blazing aviator and eccentric visionary. On or about 31st March 1903 a reclusive New Zealand farmer Richard Pearse climbed into a self-built monoplane and flew for about 140 metres before crashing into a gorse hedge on his Waitohi property . Even at half the distance Pearse must have felt the liberating but anxious exhilaration of flying. There is uncertainty about whether it met the definitions of sustained flight, but it came eight months before the Wright Brothers entered the record books at Kitty Hawk North Carolina on 17th December 1903." -- http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/pearse.html

Here we go again

[elrous0]

Yet another round of the "Who invented it first" pissing contest. An American claims to invent something and 10 Europeans jump up to say "No, Sir Dunston Whogivesashit from MY country actually invented it first!", followed by a black nationalist who announces that it was actually a black man who invented it first, a Hispanic who proclaims that a Guatemalan invented it first, etc.

Re:Here we go again

[sm62704]

followed by a black nationalist who announces that it was actually a black man who invented it first, a Hispanic who proclaims that a Guatemalan invented it first

That would be George Washington Carver Rodrigues LaFitte, the black Hispanic Frenchman who invented a method of storing binary data ao a peanut?

Re:Here we go again

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and they are all wrong because really a Korean was the first to invent sound recording and playback.

Re:Here we go again

[AJWM]

That would be George Washington Carver Rodrigues LaFitte, the black Hispanic Frenchman who invented a method of storing binary data ao a peanut?

"While he was living in St. Petersberg, so it was clearly a Russian inwention."
                                                                                                        -- Ensign Chekov

Re:Here we go again

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. It rather goes like that, someone suggests it might not have been the allmighty transcendent american genius who created something and hundreds of hurt american egos scream in concert dismay: nonono WEE AAARE THEE GREAATEST!

Re:Here we go again

[Brother Phil]

I wouldn't be at all surprised - I've just read the Wikipedia article on the Song Dynasty.

Re:Here we go again

[elrous0]

To this American it looks more like a bunch of resentful Europeans screaming ANYONE BUT THE AMERICANS! Seriously, is there ANYTHING that we evil Americans have invented that you WON'T try to dispute?

Re:Here we go again

[Jesus_666]

You're displaying envy paranoia, which was discovered by a Swede, if I'm not mistaken.

Re:Here we go again

[maxwell demon]

They surely had invented DRM back then, too.

Well?

[NotInfinitumLabs]

Where's the fucking sound clip?

Re:Well?

[mistapotta]

From TFA: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1860v2.mp3
For comparison, the same song sung in 1931: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1931.mp3

Re:Well?

[sm62704]

Where's the fucking sound clip?

whitehouse.com? And what does that have to do with the first sound recording, which TFA says will be released Friday?

Considering how late some /. stories are I'm surprised this didn't wait until Friday too. Can we get a dupe, please? Like, on Friday? I mean, it's not like we don't get a lot of them anyway.

Re:Well?

[Anonymous Coward]

ZOMG Torrent plz!

Re:Well?

[Joe the Lesser]

The RIAA is releasing it next month on their 'Best of the Live 19th Century Recordings' album, priced at $39.99.

Re:Well?

[Anonymous Coward]

It used to be available, but the MPAA filed a Takedown notice and sued the ISP that was hosting it.

Re:Well?

[Pharmboy]

The RIAA is releasing it next month on their 'Best of the Live 19th Century Recordings' album, priced at $39.99.

And thepiratebay.org is releasing it 5 days before it hits the stores...

Re:Well?

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be "from TFATFRJSTSYAFU" (the freaking article that freaking requires javascript to show you a freaking URL).

Re:Well?

[noidentity]

Right here: --~~~~^v^v/\/\/\/\/^v^v~--~/\/\~~-~~/\/\/\/^v^v^v---^v^v^v--~~~~~---

Re:Well?

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, this is one of those sites whose web designer is too freaking incompetent to deliver a functional website without Javascript.

The audio links just don't appear, not even an error message, nothing.

Thanks NYTimes.

Re:Well?

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! ROTFLMFFAO! *giggle*snort* Oh god.. I think I swallowed my tongue!

Re:Well?

[mako1138]

Veni, vidi, roflmao.

Not quite the same.

[TripMaster Monkey]

Since de Martinville's "recording" was never even intended for playback, much less successfully played back at the time, I'd say that Edison retains the title.

Re:Not quite the same.

[bogjobber]

Why is it not the same? It *was* intended for playback, but he realized that technology was far beyond him. As it says in TFA, he was simply hoping to put down a recording that someone would later be able to decipher, which is exactly what happened. Thomas Edison definitely still deserves credit for his invention, but this is pretty remarkable nonetheless.

Re:Not quite the same.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since de Martinville's "recording" was never even intended for playback, much less successfully played back at the time, I'd say that Edison retains the title.

I'd say Edison clearly retains the title for playback and the Martinville clearly holds the new title for recording.

It's okay, bruised Americans... you still hold the more important title.

Re:Not quite the same.

[TripMaster Monkey]

Why is it not the same? It *was* intended for playback, but he realized that technology was far beyond him.

Um, no, it wasn't. He never intended to play back the recording.

As it says in TFA, he was simply hoping to put down a recording that someone would later be able to decipher, which is exactly what happened.

TFA says nothing of the sort. In fact, TFA makes it clear that Scott considered Edison's work a bastardization of his own.

From TFA:

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. ...
Scott's device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered. ...
Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for "appropriating" his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but "writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means."

Re:Not quite the same.

[Anonymous Coward]

As it says in TFA, he was simply hoping to put down a recording that someone would later be able to decipher, which is exactly what happened.

TFA says nothing of the sort.
...

From TFA:

...
Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.
...

Perhaps you need to read more closely.

Re:Not quite the same.

[samkass]

I'd say Edison clearly retains the title for playback and the Martinville clearly holds the new title for recording.

That's like saying that someone invented some hard disk backup software... except that it was impossible to restore anything backed up with it.

Edison was the first to reproduce sound mechanically. Separating it out into recording and playback makes little sense except as an academic exercise. I know the French have a need to claim prior invention on everything (by the way, Ader never had a practical flying machine, either), but it's getting kind of ridiculous.

Re:Not quite the same.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why is it not the same? It *was* intended for playback, but he realized that
> technology was far beyond him. As it says in TFA, he was simply hoping to put down a
> recording that someone would later be able to decipher, which is exactly what
> happened. Thomas Edison definitely still deserves credit for his invention, but this
> is pretty remarkable nonetheless.

And if you had read the entire article, you would have realized Scott did not intend it for playback but as an end unto itself. He though Edison was missing the point by creating playback!

Re:Not quite the same.

[Jesus_666]

I have to agree with the sibling. Scott saw his work as the first step towards a speech-to-text device. Audio playback was not intended and not desired.

Re:Not quite the same.

[Matt Perry]

the idea of audio playback had not been conceived.

A dubious claim. There's no way to know for sure that the idea of playback had not been conceived by someone.

Re:Not quite the same.

[Hawke666]

You quoted it yourself:
"Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered."

deciphering a record of human speech....hmm...sounds like playing it back to me.

Re:Not quite the same.

[Whiteox]

Agree!
There are other possibilities with visual results of a phonograph recording.
In fact, I think it was Western Electric that used analog waveforms of speech and music on film to decode 'visual' representation of sounds in Talkies.
In fact, if Scott's invention would have taken off, then modern day technology would easily be able to decode his recorded sounds.
Pity none can be found.

So...

[truthsearch]

So Edison is no longer the father of recorded sound, but still the father of playback, right?

Re:So...

[dex22]

Man, he's gonna get SO sued...

Possible contents:

[Ancient_Hacker]

Likely contents:

• "American scum like you cannot have a table at our fine restaurant."
• "Regardez! The recording industry strike begins at dawn!"

Re:Possible contents:

[stuporglue]

OT, but funny.

We were at a packed restaurant in France with my inlaws. The waiter needed to get past us and said :

Escuse me monsieur, I must walk...it is, ah, very nice

Re:Possible contents:

[Anonymous Coward]

At least he tried the few words of English he knew, and this in his own country. When was the last time you heard an American waiter try a few words of French, or even recognize the language? Hell, most of the Americans that are here don't even try to speak that much French.

Re:Possible contents:

[Anonymous Coward]

When was the last time you heard an American waiter try a few words of French, or even recognize the language?

Well, I just helped a Canadian friend out with a tech problem he was having. He thanked me for it, to which I replied: "Je vous en prie." He then replied, "oh la la, garde ca, il parle francais!"

Does that count?

Re:Possible contents:

[phayes]

You'd be surprised...

Last summer while visiting my family in the US with my french family we had a number of pleasant conversations with waiters who were surprisingly fluent.

Re:Possible contents:

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure it doesn't say "first"?

Re:Possible contents:

[ITIL Prince]

He was French. The contents were: "We surrender"

Money I don't have

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that a recording you can not play back is the same as money you can't access, useless.

How big a cut does the **AA get??

[jrmcc]

probably why there is no sound clip with the story....

Re:How big a cut does the **AA get??

[Mr. Slippery]

probably why there is no sound clip with the story....

Eh? RTFA. MP3 is provided. For those too lazy, here: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1860v2.mp3

It's noisy as hell but recognizably a human voice.

Revisionist History

[Random BedHead Ed]

Sometimes so-called "revisionist history" is history that has been revised for a good reason. Columbus did not discover America, and didn't even discover it for Europeans. And Edison not only didn't invent sound recording, he didn't invent the light bulb either (which isn't to say he wasn't extraordinarily influential in both industries).

Re:Revisionist History

[Oligonicella]

You're being pedantic. Even your own link says his had "an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable." In shorter terms, it worked in a utilitarian way. He may not be the inventor of the incandescent apparatus, but he's the inventor of the light bulb.

Re:Revisionist History

[MightyMartian]

Well, it's certainly true that Columbus didn't discover the Americas (it seems that all sorts of people from ancient Asiatics through more recent Siberians through Polynesians, Irish monks and Vikings were there first). The key thing, at least from Eurocentric and world history point of view, is that it was Columbus's "rediscovery" (so to speak) which lead in very short order to the colonization of the Americas by various European powers. It wasn't really the beginning of European colonization, however, as the Portugese had been doing that along the west coast of Africa for about a half century prior.

Re:Revisionist History

[Random BedHead Ed]

(which isn't to say he wasn't extraordinarily influential in both industries)

You're being inaccurate. Perhaps I should have expanded on the above to avoid flames, but I gave credit where due - Edison was an amazing inventor and businessman who devised a complete light bulb system, without which lights would not have been marketable or even very useful. But some of the prior examples of incandescent lights are, in fact, bulbs. Edison can be credited for vastly improving their design, and consequently for the fact that they became popular. That's patentable and enormously beneficial, but it doesn't mean he invented the core concept of an electrified filament in a bulb. By your logic Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invented operating systems and Apple invented the GUI.

WOM!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back. I think it's just spectacular that we are able to do so 150 years later.

Not just the world's first sound recording, then, but also the world's first Write-only memory!

History shows us yet again,

[pwnies]

That this seems to be the case with may of Edison's "inventions". Many of them were either invented by one of his subordinates and simply registered under his own name in the patent process, or were taken altogether from another scientist and claimed directly as his own. Take a look at Nikola Tesla's history and you'll see what I mean.

Re:History shows us yet again,

[Anonymous Coward]

Edison was more of a research and developer (and tireless self-promoter) than an inventor.

No proof

[kextyn]

How do you prove you recorded something if it's just some stuff on paper that you can't play back? Even if we knew about this recording previously it wouldn't be proof of a recording until we were able to play it back. I think he should now be credited with the first recording, but Edison still has the first playback right?

Loyal to the 'foil

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, tinfoil. Is there anything it can't do? :)

Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[tjstork]

Edison was the man, because, unlike this inventor, his device allowed people to play back sounds. It wasn't even possible to play back the recording this other guy made until they could scan the paper and convert the signal to a waveform. As a side note, I'd have to ask: this is what passes for research these days? I'm unimpressed.

Newton beat Leibniz to calculus. Really, the whole thing with Newton was that, he wrote the principia while trying to hide the calculus that he used to invent. It's pretty difficult for someone to come out with a volume like that, unless they have calculus. I might even start using Newton's fluxion notation....

As for Einstein, while we was off about quantum physics, he did predict the appearance of stars -behind- the sun during a solar eclipse, which is really outrageous when you think about it.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[eldavojohn]

As a side note, I'd have to ask: this is what passes for research these days? I'm unimpressed. Thank you, that's precisely the kind of suppressive rhetoric I was talking about, I couldn't have illustrated that better myself. It passed for research back then, not "these days" and whether or not someone could play it back or not still made it impressive. Curiosity in the weakest minds can lead to some of the greatest discoveries.

What's wrong with saying "Scott devised a way to record but not play back while Edison devised both" in the history books?

Furthermore, many accounts I've read claim that Leibniz beat Newton to calculus. I wasn't there so I can't say but I still think his name should be mentioned more than it is. Especially since some accounts give Leibniz credit with both the first and second (hence the term Leibniz Integral Rule) fundamental theories of calculus even if his logic to find them was flawed.

The fact that you side step Einstein's efforts to overlook quantum theory by pointing out an amazing discovery by him is hilarious. Should I try to circumvent the calculus discussion by pointing out Leibniz's contributions to philosophy?

Frankly, I am dumbfounded why it's difficult to list the multiple peoples it takes to make a brilliant discovery and even further dumbfounded when a man of science attempts to take credit for or repress someone's work.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[everphilski]

What's wrong with saying "Scott devised a way to record but not play back while Edison devised both" in the history books?

This morning my son (2) scribbled a drawing. "This is Salty" he said, his favorite train engine from Thomas the Tank Engine series. Now I kinda knew what it was because he picked the right colors, but in the end it was a bunch of scribbles on a page. A year from now we will have no clue what it is.

My son devised a way to record his thoughts, but not play them back a year from now. Is this meaningful? Not really. It's meaningful that he's trying, and his mental recollection is great, but scribbles on a piece of paper, other than sentimental value, will be meaningless a year from now. I think you suffer from sentimentality.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[Scrameustache]

What's wrong with saying "Scott devised a way to record but not play back while Edison devised both" in the history books?
  It's wrong to say that Edison invented a way to record sound, when what he did was use a French design that does that, and modified it for playback.

Props for playback, but lets not exaggerate his contribution to the field.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a wonderful story. I don't see how your analogy in anyway applies here. Are you comparing Scott to a child? Are you comparing his drawing to a recording that actually was read back by scientists today?

Aha, your signature (Thanks for the memories, Mr. Favre. McCain '08) explains it all.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[tjstork]

It's wrong to say that Edison invented a way to record sound, when what he did was use a French design that does that, and modified it for playback

I'd say independently invented. Edison couldn't speak French. He didn't have a formal education. And, the way he thought, about transforming one thing to another, from mechanical to electrical energy and back, probably made it easier for him to see the phonograph independently than it would be to steal someone else's idea.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[Maximum Prophet]

What's wrong with saying "Scott devised a way to record but not play back while Edison devised both" in the history books?

Because the history books would get too large if you included everybody? Julius Braunsdorf had invented an electric light long before Edison, but he is mostly forgotten, and people are taught that the electric light was thought impossible before Edison invented it.

Seriously, history has it's fashions just like everything else humans do. It's been fashionable to tell schoolchildren that everyone thought that the earth was flat before Columbus, even though the size of the earth had been measured, and kings carried septer and orbs symbolizing their control of the earth.

What can be done about it? Wikis can help, because the size doesn't matter. We can include everybody who had any role in an invention. Mostly we need to abolish the myth of the lone inventor creating new stuff without any help from the outside world.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[LocalH]

Please read the article next time:

"In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott's work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound."

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that what your son produced is indecipherable to anyone, while Scott's recording was coherent; he just lacked the ability to play it back. There is no technology that would be able to decipher your son's scribbles, and none will be invented.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice that you end with an ad hominem that makes you sound foppish.

Why not just let it lie. His arguments were not very strong. Your statements obviously had more merit.

Instead, you debase yourself by attacking him. Too bad.

McCain '08. A media-whore beats a racist (or those who implicitly prop up racists) and a liar any day.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[pintpusher]

Frankly, I am dumbfounded why it's difficult to list the multiple peoples it takes to make a brilliant discovery... because that introduces uncertainty into history and that promotes thought...

I guess it's obvious that I'm reading "Lies my teacher told me" at the moment.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[phayes]

Hé, le sacrémoustache chauvin, apprends a lire...

It is much more incorrect to say, as you did, that Edison reused Scott's design as a stepping point on his quest to invent a device that did more than make squiggles on a sheet of paper. Edison's invention of the Phonograph owed nothing to Scott. Other than as art, Scott's work was useless to anyone for over 150 years until the technology was devised to read it back.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[westlake]

Julius Braunsdorf had invented an electric light long before Edison, but he is mostly forgotten, and people are taught that the electric light was thought impossible before Edison invented it.

What came out of Edison's lab was a commercially viable system to bring electricity safely into the home - and use it for something more significant than ringing a doorbell.

The domestication of the electric light is a very different problem from installing an on-site generator to power the searingly intense carbon arc lamps used to illuminate a prison yard

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[Anonymous Coward]

and people are taught that the electric light was thought impossible before Edison invented it.

we are also taught that the USA's birth was a sanitized and nice thing. with quakers and pilgrims and such. it was a happy dance.... Ignore we did incredibly horrible things to the natives here, performed medical experiments on them that makes the crap that went down in 1940's in germany look like it was child's play. How the founding fathers were not honorable freedom fighters but very wealthy businessmen that convinced the lesser classes to fight for them to reduce taxes and elevate themselves politically.

History that is in the mainstream books is all fairy-tales. It's written by the conquerors and is seldom the truth.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this definition, "An invention is worthless unless you can get a critical mass of other people to accept it, understand it, and repeat it."

It's almost like "what is the sound of a hand clapping?" or "if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?"

The answer, it doesn't really matter, unless it impacts other people.

I can cure cancer but if no one ever learns of it, does it matter? You see, politics matter.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[Scrameustache]

Please read the article next time: Madness? This is SLASHDOOOOOOOOT!

"In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott's work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound." Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But documented duplicitous behavior is evidence of duplicitous behavior.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[DRJlaw]

Because the history books would get too large if you included everybody? Julius Braunsdorf had invented an electric light long before Edison, but he is mostly forgotten, and people are taught that the electric light was thought impossible before Edison invented it.

No. History books tend to include enough information concerning major inventions to show that "invention" is an incremental process. People's oral summaries of the history books or history itself tends grossly oversimplify issues because, at a minimum, they have to match the level of detail to the level of interest in order to hold the listener(s).

"When he announced that he intended to produce an electric light that would compete with gaslight, the stock prices of gaslight companies tumbled as their executives panicked. Many people, most notably Sir Joseph Swan, had tried to invent an electric light using an incandescent filament, or wire, enclosed in a glass bulb, but had not been able to create a filament that could withstand intense heat over long enough periods oftime to be practical. Even Edison had a tough time of it, going through a long, trial-and-error process in which he tested thousands of materials. Undaunted by failures, Edison finally found that a scorched cotton thread would work best. When heated in a vacuum, it produced a white glow without melting, evaporating, or breaking. Although Swan came up with a similar light bulb around the same time, Edison patented his idea more aggressively, promoted his product more effectively, and sketched out a practical system of power supply which could support its use on a large scale. On New Year's Eve of 1879, Edisongave a public demonstration of the new bulb, lighting up his laboratory anda half mile of streets in Menlo Park before of thousands of spectators. Edison had not only invented an economical light source, but developed an entire system for generating and distributing electricity from a central power station." "History book"

Humphry Davy is cursing your name in the afterlife because you've fixated on this Braunsdorf character who merely improved upon pre-existing arc lights. There's another horde of people who likely long before that overloaded a wire, but didn't run off to tell the world how to make a short lived flash of light by screwing up in an impractical manner.

Do you want to know what Thomas Edison invented? Read U.S. Patent No. 223,898.. Most importantly, look at claim 1:

1. An electric lamp for giving light by incandescence, consisting of a filiment of carbon of high resistance, made as described, and secured to metallic wires, as set forth.

My public school taught that Edison invented the first practical incandecent bulb by trying several thousand types of materials, not that Edison invented the first electric light. I'm very willing to bet that yours taught something similar as well, but you've oversimplified the information, whether you ment to or not.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[mikael]

His son has invented his own hieroglyphic language - to him it is obvious what it means, and if his parents have it framed, he will probably remember what it means for his whole life. But anyone else will have no clue what it means.

A real world archeological example is Rongo Rongo, an Easter Island language that was found written on wooden tablets. The unfortuate part is that while the authors may have stored the most advanced knowledge of their civilisation, they never anticipated that knowledge of their language would die out, so no one can decipher what they mean.

So the lesson is that if anyone develops a storage format for audio/video, they should always make sure that there exists some means to reproduce that information.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[agrippa_cash]

The reason for not mentioning this guy next to Edison, I think, is that if he had invented the wax spool 20 years later (or Edison had invented this machine 20 years earlier) no one would have bothered to note this invention. It is interesting as a curiosity, but as technology it reminds me very much of "AJKDHJKASHDIERBBBZOU@$#dDFJ."

The preceding is a perfect analogy, and the funniest joke ever written. Now you only need to wait for sufficiently advanced technology decrypt the example in all its majesty and grandure. Be careful.

Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[Maximum Prophet]

You're correct, but the history books I had in school didn't spend too much time on invention, mostly they were about politics.

For an excellent history lesson about inventions, check out James Burke's connections http://www.amazon.com/Connections-James-Burke/dp/0743299558/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206710516&sr=8-1 either the book, or the DVD set.

The books we read in school were very dry and didn't emphasis the interconnectedness of all inventions. Even your summary of what Edison did, left out the fact that he had a lab employing hundreds of people. Edison didn't try tens of thousands of materials, he had assistants doing most of the work, while he supervised. Even though Edison disdained "book learning", he employed many PhDs to help with the process.

You're right about the many people who may have made wires glow, but didn't capitalize on it. Hero had invented a steam engine in ancient Greece, but didn't put it to any practical use.

Also check out the writing of Don Lancaster. http://tinaja.com/ He says that ideas used to be dime a dozen, but now they are penny a pound in hundred pound lots. His point is that people think that their ideas are worth something when it's the implementation that makes a great product. Myths about the invention process are what fuels patent trolls. They seem to think that because they have a great idea on paper, they should be able to sue the people who actually put the work into turning an idea into a product. The invention myths need to be dispelled so that judges and juries will send the trolls packing.

been done before

[apodyopsis]

I'd of thought it would of said "testing, testing, testing.."

Hell, he could of recorded anything he wanted as long as there was no method of playing it back.

It reminds me of that clever SW speech recognition that decoded audio from the Berghof films of Hitler and Eva Braun - I bet they did not realise that technology would one say be able to decode their speech, HAL would of loved it. Alternatively there were some very clever approaches to scanning vinyl recordings and cleaning up the signal digitally before recontructing the audio without hisses and scratches. This is not new, but its certainly clever.

The Hitler tapes are darn right creepy, I saw a great documentary on it, in fact you can watch the whole thing here:-
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2763127556620650689&q=hitler+speaks+duration%3Along&total=36&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

On the historical front, it once again proves that in the world of science many people generally work on the same this simultaneously and behind every great man there are many almost great men who got there at the same time or earlier. Of course, everybody knows that Newton got there first...

Re:been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

What does "would of" mean?

Re:been done before

[Colonel Korn]

It's an interesting error and pretty widespread.

Would have ===> would've (written) ====> would've (as the way most people say it when speaking aloud) ===> would of (increasingly common mistake in writing)

Re:been done before

[Jesus_666]

Language in evolution. In 100 years, "would of" might end up as an officially recognized phrase.

BTW, these kinds of mistakes can be used to distinguish native speakers from non-native ones... The latter are less prone to them. We're more likely to use weirdly constructed sentences and false friends (eg. the German word for "without" is "ohne", which is similar to "only" - which once prompted my father to order "scrambled eggs only onions").

Re:been done before

[ed.markovich]

that's one of the most interesting things i've watched on the internet, thanks.

Re:been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

That was definitely one of the more interesting things I've watched on the internet. Thanks for linking it!

So what

[sckeener]

Columbus didn't discover America, but he made the most impact on it.

So what if Edison didn't make the first recording. He is the guy that ran with the ball and scored the touchdown.

Give props where they are due. Have this, 2 decade earlier guy, be a footnote.

Re:So what

[trolltalk.com]

Columbus didn't discover America, but he made the most impact on it.

Really? So all those people who were living here at the time didn't have any impact?

And what about the vikings from 10 centuries ago who explored Newfoundland? We probably have them to thank for the Newfoundland dog.

Re:So what

[Anonymous Coward]

"Columbus didn't discover America, but he made the most impact on it."

Precisely, how can you 'discover' a place where people are already living?

Re:So what

[boojum.cat]

Columbus didn't discover America

Nonsense. Columbus did discover America. He just wasn't the first one to discover it. He didn't know it was there before he found it, so he discovered it. If you find your wife in bed with another man, would you say you didn't discover her infidelity just because she knew about it first?

  -- Steve

Re:So what

[Joe the Lesser]

Well, even if you just consider the diseases ushered in after Columbus' wake, I'd say he had a huge impact.

He hyped Western trans-atlantic exploration like nobody before him. The book he wrote describing what he had discovered influenced the explorers who followed in his wake looking for riches, and more importantly their wealthy financiers.

Re:So what

[jd]

So what if Edison didn't make the first recording. He is the guy that ran with the ball and scored the touchdown.

This would indeed have been a fine achievement, but for the problem that the game was golf.

Re:So what

[phayes]

History is written by the winners. When you have the military power to obliterate the current inhabitants & the will to use it, I'd say the word "discover" applies...

Re:So what

[pcgabe]

Wife? I don't understand.

Can you rephrase it using a car analogy instead?

Re:So what

[oldhack]

Let it go, man. You have to let it go.

Re:So what

[Whiteox]

Nonsense. Columbus did discover America. What exactly do you mean by that?
He only discovered the West Indies.

Columbus' voyages across the Atlantic Ocean began a European effort at exploration and colonization of the Western Hemisphere. While history places great significance on his first voyage of 1492, he did not actually reach the American mainland... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus

Re:So what

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting that you should compare Edison with Columbus. It's certainly a valid one, but unlike what you seem to think, that's not because Columbus is someone to look up to.

Sure, he was influential, and so was Edison. So was Hitler. And lest you scream "godwin!", what Columbus did, and what he enabled later generations to do, is exactly what Hitler did, too.

Needless to say, Edison isn't quite *that* bad, but he's mostly a PR genius, not a technical one. The Bill Gates of the 19th century, if you will.

DMCA Violation!

[khendron]

So some scientists managed to decipher and playback a recording of some singing that was encoded 150 years ago. That sounds like a violation of the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions! They'll be getting a letter from the RIAA soon.

Re:DMCA Violation!

[DarkOx]

150 years! Why this guy had the most effective ARM scheme ever!

Mod UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Edison built a system that could record AND playback. Without both components, the output might be interesting, but largely useless.

He was the first.

[TheSHAD0W]

IMO Edison can still be considered the father of sound recording. While he may not have been the first person to transcribe sound in another medium, he was indeed the first to discover a medium that would allow for easy playback - and reproduction as well. He also commercialized it, and the definition of "father" is making babies. :-P

Re:He was the first.

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO Edison can still be considered the father of sound recording

While he may not have been the first person to transcribe sound in another medium... Okie doke.

he was indeed the first to discover a medium that would allow for easy playback - and reproduction as well No, that was Emile Berliner, who created the first disc record. Edison's was cylindrical, which was difficult (and expensive) to produce and inconvenient to store. Although Edison did consider the disc shape, he did not pursue it and instead focused on the cylinder because he (correctly) felt it was technologically superior.

Years later, after the disc proved to be the better in terms of reproduction costs and storage and all-around convenience, Edison reluctantly abandoned the cylinders in favor of Berliner's discs.

And since no /. post is complete without digression...

the definition of "father" is

• A man who creates, originates, or founds something: Chaucer is considered the father of English poetry.
• An early form; a prototype.
  
• A member of the senate in ancient Rome.

...making babies You are thinking of sire, or perhaps even sperm donor.

Re:He was the first.

[petermgreen]

Years later, after the disc proved to be the better in terms of reproduction costs and storage and all-around convenience
Later variants may have been more conviniant but that is not the main point.

What edison achived was a sound recording system that was usefull. The reason it was usefull was because he had a way to convert those recordings back into audio form so that humans could interpret them.

Unfortunately for this french guys idea of automatic transcription hearing and vision are very different. Two waveforms that appear totally different on a trace can sound pretty much identical to human ears. Recoding something in a format noone could interpret until after over a centuary of technology advances wasn't usefull.

Re:He was the first.

[westlake]

What edison achived was a sound recording system that was usefull.

The cylindrical - or, later, the flexible belt - recording had a rather long life in the office. Easily indexed. Relatively simple and compact machines, ideal for dictation.

Re:He was the first.

[Amiga Trombone]

Years later, after the disc proved to be the better in terms of reproduction costs and storage and all-around convenience, Edison reluctantly abandoned the cylinders in favor of Berliner's discs.

Actually, he never did adopt Berliner's disks. He used another proprietary format called the Diamond Disk. It differed from the standard Berliner disk in that it was played at 80 RPM's rather than 78, used a reproducer with a diamond stylus rather than steel, had vertical grooves rather than lateral ones, and were about a quarter inch thick.

Edison had the distinction of introducing the first long-playing disk in 1926. They were Diamond Disks that were about 12", and could contain about 40 minutes of music.

edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his time

[circletimessquare]

he really didn't invent much. what he did was market, mass produce and popularize a lot early electrical inventions. and made a lot of money too. claiming that he was the man who invented all of this stuff is just part of the marketing campaign. rather than an anonymous guy in his lab, or some other guy whom he ripped off, or some other guy who discovered something as a curiousity, but never followed up, and was forgotten, or alexander graham bell, or nikolai tesla

and i'm not really denigrating edison. i am in fact saying that the cult of whomever invents something is overhyped. a lot of what is important in this world is producing the thing, popularizing it, putting it in the hands of consumers, not just dreaming the damn thing up. that's actually pretty easy. the light bulb was invented individually by half a dozen different guys in the 19th century. but the lion's share of the credit goes to edison. why? because he actually followed up and put the dang thing in the hand's of consumers. and that matters. some may think it is unfair, but who said life was fair? go study the farnsworth and rca and the invention of the television if you want a lesson on invetion and fairness and reality

i had a 32M rio pmp300 MP3 player in 1998, many years before an iPod was a twinkle in steve job's eye. but the mass of western industrial consumers didn't take portable mp3 players that seriously until steve jobs gave them something gleaming and sexy. such is the way of the world

there is more to progress than just invention. there is also streamlining for mass production, financing, distributing, marketing, etc. and those jobs (no pun intended) are not as sexy, but they oftentimes decide the tempo of progress more than some lonely guy tinkering somewhere. and, perhaps even more importantly, they decide immortality: whose name gets stuck in the history books next to an invention. and they also decide who gets the billions in riches from that invention too

believe me, in 2108, when someone wikiyahoogoogle's "mp3 player" on their visor computer, they won't see a rio pmp300. they will see steve job's cryogenically frozen head with a perfect gleaming iPodWhite(tm) smile

RIAA

[dcsmith]

I'd say that since the New York Times has 'made available for download' a copy of the recording, we should be hearing from the RIAA any minute now.

Seconded

[hassanchop]

It's difficult to claim this is a working system when one of the main requirements is missing.

Re:edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti

[nsayer]

More Gates than Jobs, considering the anti-competitive behavior he engaged in.

lol

[thatskinnyguy]

He screwed-over Tesla. So why not some French guy?

No surprise here

[unity100]

edison was one of the biggest phonies, invention and reputation snatchers in the history, as we know from many recent scandalous discoveries about what he did.

"Recording"

[Woundweavr]

Ugh IV of Big Cave recorded sound too but the recording only lasted as long as it took for the sound rebounding off the far wall to come back to him. Sure his didn't have the longevity of later attempts, but he came up with a technique that could playback his vocalizations! Given future advances in technology, it may be possible to retrieve this early recordings ....

So this gentleman came up with a way to make marks on paper that in the future would be able to direct the creation of music and/or sound? So did 9th century monks, when they codified musical notation. A computer can translate those marks on paper to sound too. While this gentleman surely deserves some credit for automating this process, without the ability to playback his sound...

Re:"Recording"

[Jesus_666]

9th century monks didn't come up with what can be seen as the precursor to modern speech-to-text software. Scott wanted automatic stenography. We still don't have it because it's extremely difficult, but he arguably made the earliest known attempt at it.

Then Edison came up with/appropriated a similar technology that performed a different, much easier task. Because Edison's device worked and Scott's didn't Edison became famous for inventing sound playback - which Scott didn't want to do. In fact, Scott saw audio playback as useless and a misuse of recording technology.

He didn't reach hs goal, but he didn't reach a different goal than you imply he didn't.

Edison and The Simpsons

[herks]

(Homer realizes that Thomas Edison has already invented safety legs for the back of a chair.) Homer: (Shouting) Aww, damn it! (Bart comes running down the basement stairs.) Bart: Hey Dad, heard you swearin'. Mind if I join in? Crap, boobs, crap! Homer: I thought I had a great idea, I must have seen it on this poster. (Bart studies Homer's Thomas Edison invention chart.) Bart: If Edison thought of that chair, how come it's not on this chart? Homer: It's not? Maybe he never told anyone about it. (Points at Edison poster.) That chair might be the only one he made. Bart: So? Homer: So, we've got to go to the Edison Museum and smash it! Then I'll be an inventor! Bart: But I thought you loved Edison. Homer: Aw, to hell with him. Bart: Yeah! Hell, damn, fart!

Re:Edison and The Simpsons

[herks]

(Homer realizes that Thomas Edison has already invented safety legs for the back of a chair.)
Homer: (Shouting) Aww, damn it!
(Bart comes running down the basement stairs.)
Bart: Hey Dad, heard you swearin'. Mind if I join in? Crap, boobs, crap!
Homer: I thought I had a great idea, I must have seen it on this poster.
(Bart studies Homer's Thomas Edison invention chart.)
Bart: If Edison thought of that chair, how come it's not on this chart?
Homer: It's not? Maybe he never told anyone about it. (Points at Edison poster.) That chair might be the only one he made.
Bart: So?
Homer: So, we've got to go to the Edison Museum and smash it! Then I'll be an inventor!
Bart: But I thought you loved Edison.
Homer: Aw, to hell with him.
Bart: Yeah! Hell, damn, fart!

Meh. Don't you people ever watch the X-Files?

[ScentCone]

Or Mythbusters? I think with a little more effort and some archeological good fortune, the Lazurus Bowl will prove to pre-date this bit of Frenchiness.

What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Doc Ruby]

The French were right up there at the forefront of progress and innovation for centuries. They practically defined the Enlightenment. Their democratic revolution followed the US lead, and even went so far as to execute their tyrant, not just kick him out. Their mathematicians and writers were among the very best, helping invent science and modern scholarship. Their engineering produced the Eiffel Tower. They gave us Jules Verne, imagining a future as fiercely as no one else except perhaps HG Wells.

But then it all hit the wall, apparently sometime in the late 1800s. Was it the Franco-Prussian War? Did they just get distracted by art and fashion long enough to get their derriere's torched in WWI? Did some magic spirit choke on a fin-de-siecle?

What happened?

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Scrameustache]

went so far as to execute their tyrant, not just kick him out. Well, he was right there, while the king of England never even set foot in America. It would have been a lot of trouble to get him to come be executed.

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[laddiebuck]

They were outshone, all the way through, by the English, the Germans, the Italians, even the Scots, and later the Americans. They weren't, in a nutshell, at the forefront of many areas (England and Germany were). I think you view their role in a slightly exaggerated fashion. For every prominent French scientist, there were half a dozen English and German ones. For every artist and writer, half a dozen Italian, German and English ones. For every philosopher, half a dozen English and Scottish ones. For every military leader, half a dozen English, American and German ones. They were probably a broad second in many of those fields, though.

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Guppy]

Their democratic revolution followed the US lead, and even went so far as to execute their tyrant, not just kick him out. They executed a lot of other people as well, in the spectacular bloodbath that was the French Revolution. The chemist Lavosier is a good example -- when his scientific worked was offered as a defense during the trial, the judge commented, "The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists; the trial can not be restrained."

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Thomasje]

I'd say the French have been doing just fine. The first successful high-speed train, the first digital information service in every home (minitel, long before the Internet became a commodity), the first supersonic airliner, the Channel Tunnel, the discovery of the HIV virus, and an automobile industry that manages to produce cars that are inexpensive, elegant, and comfortable all at once (Citroën seats FTW!), and they continue to be among the world's best when it comes to food, wine, and fashion.

What's not to admire? I'm having trouble coming up with a lot countries with a more impressive record of accomplishment.

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Doc Ruby]

Give me a break. The Chunnel and the Concorde were 50/50 partnerships with the UK, and their food & wine is a mark of their previous couple thousand years, not since 1900.

You just named a very short list of impressive accomplishments, even including those. The US, UK, Germany and other rivals to France do that every day before breakfast.

This isn't a question of whether France is cool - I love France. But the question is how they lost their leadership. Their performance since the end of the colonial era is as an also-ran, by a large nation that had been churning out innovation with the best of them for a long time. What happened?

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[shoor]

The French 'defined' the enlightenment? Sure they had Voltaire, but what about Sam Adams, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson?

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Thomasje]

Give me a break. The Chunnel and the Concorde were 50/50 partnerships with the UK And your point is...? Cooperating with the UK on these projects means France doesn't get credit?

I thought cooperation was a good thing. Does an accomplishment only count if you do it on your own?

and their food & wine is a mark of their previous couple thousand years, not since 1900. I'd love to see you try that line on the farmers, vintners, and chefs of France. Like they don't have to work hard to produce the fine things they do. Just because that tradition is old, doesn't mean the work takes care of itself today!

You just named a very short list of impressive accomplishments, even including those. The US, UK, Germany and other rivals to France do that every day before breakfast. Very short? I can't help noticing that you're not even trying to demonstrate how the US, UK, Germany, and other rivals outdo France every day. Let's hear it -- I'm listening.

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[4D6963]

What's left of the Roman empire? The Byzantine empire? The bright civilisation started by prophet Muhammad? Dominations in any domain don't last forever. You guys (in the USA) are just about to find out.

To answer your question more directly, WWI, WWII, the economic crisis of the early 1930's (which the USA went through perhaps better than Europe thanks to a cunning strategy partially based on the abandon of the gold standard), colonial wars and the subsequent loss of these colonies didn't help either the British or the French, while the USA were rising to the top.

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[bythescruff]

"...and even went so far as to execute their tyrant..."

Sounds like you Yanks could learn something from the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. :)

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first successful high-speed train, ...

Depends what you mean by 'high-speed'. The British Rail class 43 HST was introduced about 5 years before the TGV and is capable of 148mph although normally limited to 125mph. This is still the mainstay of the Great Western line from London Paddington 32 years later (and extensively used elsewhere) so it's clearly sucessful. Maybe the TGV should be called 'the first sucessful *very* high speed train'?

(See this wikipedia article

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Doc Ruby]

As soon as we can, we're gonna make him boil himself in oil, which we'll give away to hippies for their biofuel cars.

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Doc Ruby]

The Romans were broken by overextending their empire while using their external enemies as internal support, while the most ambitious moved East to Byzantium. The Byzantines were broken by relying on trade rather than military in a military world. The Muslim Caliphate absorbed too many foreign cultures without using enough of their traditional methods of living, so required forced ignorance to keep the old ways from creeping back and undoing the contrived faithy government. What happens to the US remains to be seen, but any collapse here will bring down the rest of the civilization, which is effectively a global American culture, while the US itself will have the strongest advantages in recovering, as has happened several times since the US became the crossroads of the global economy over a century ago.

BTW, "what's left" of those old empires is 1: Europe and global Christianity; 2: Turkey (which was still a serious empire until the British dismantled it and absorbed it commercially a century ago); 3: the Islamic world, containing a billion people, much of the world's cash, huge spans of territory, and domination of critical global industries like energy and shipping/ports. What will remain of the US hegemony after the current crisis is done will probably last a while, too, despite the current condition of direct competition among similar powers (all closely interconnected), unlike those past precedents.

But all of that is different from France's predicament. By the start of WWI France was largely already done with its leadership in everything but clothing style, some literature and painting, and some architecture - all of which were not only easily copied abroad, but influential only to the extent that they were copied abroad. And then sometime between 1870-1910 or so, France seems to have given up. Maybe successive defeats by Germany, or (or combined with) the collapse of its global agricultural empire (underway through the 1800s). But not really comparable to those others you cited, because France wasn't the dominant empire in its territory before it suddenly declined. You're comparing apples and oranges: military/political "world" (on whatever historical scale) domination to cultural "retirement". None of those predecessors offer a model for France.

There is a possible previous model: Colonial Spain. Mainly Spain's ascendance was due to the sudden tech leap turning distance from an impossible barrier into a conduit for power, in which Spain had all the advantages and few disadvantages. Long distance warships carrying cannon, rifles and horses, suddenly made available disadvantaged (and largely unknown) conquerable rivals unable to reach back to Spain, where the Church kept neighbors with military threats aligned under "Christendom" (and arranged marriages among an extended family ruling all of them). When the rivals caught up technologically and politically, Spain's temporary (a couple centuries) advantage collapsed, and with it Spain's cultural leadership. Maybe France's long-evolved leadership hit a similar tech/political wall, but no one's explained that yet.

Something happened. What?

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[4D6963]

Something happened. What?

Well you seem to know better about history than myself, but despite being French my knowledge of France prior to WWI is relatively limited. However I seem to sense that France's decline is somehow similar to the USA's current decline. I mean what is causing America's current decline? The rise of other regions (Europe, India, Japan, China..), relative economic hardship, bad education policies? Seems to me just like the bunch of factors that made something what it is (for example leadership and domination in certain key domains) are not there any more, like simply losing an advantage, or an advantage to being that big anymore, or not simply enough to guarantee success.

Basically that's as if you were the first one to sell radio sets in the 1900's-1910's. You would have the advantage of being ahead of anyone else, so your success would be guaranteed for a while, but you would have a tough time maintaining that lead with new players joining the game, plus the landscape evolving in such a way that you'd find yourself having to move on quickly to new things like TV sets and other type of consumer electronics if you want to maintain a lead. My point being, being the leader involves always being on top of everything. Having a single few advantages that help you at some point in time don't guarantee you'll be the boss for centuries.

But not really comparable to those others you cited, because France wasn't the dominant empire in its territory before it suddenly declined.

Well, when you look at it, France was the dominant empire in the early 19th century. The ensuing political instabilities and civil unrest certainly didn't help, also I'm not sure France became quite a leader regarding industrialisation in the mid 19th century. Maybe France's apogee was circa 1812, with a decline really starting by the 1840-50s, to get even worse with the war of 1870, WWI, the economic crisis of the 1930s, WWII and the decolonisation wars. That's how I'd answer to your question.

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[Doc Ruby]

I'm surprised (and a little flattered) to learn I know French history better than a French person. But I do wonder from where you're getting what history you do know. Because France wasn't the dominant empire in the early 19th Century, despite Napoleon. France's dominance ended with the rise of first Spanish, then British power, along with the independence of Northern Europe from Catholicism. France's dominance at that later time was limited to military conquest. Which was short lived. And which was at the same time as the loss of much of France's colonial empire, specifically Haiti (which was 1/3 of France's economy) and Louisiana (which was 1/3 of what is now the US, and led to losing Quebec, which was 1/3 of Canada). A decade of conquest that you can't keep, which destroys the conquered territory's ability to deliver much value except for launching more wars, doesn't make for a "leading empire". The actual leading empire at the time was Britain, spanning the globe and centuries, raking in the booty, and keeping the rest of the world trying to catch up. I know it might be hard to convince someone from France that the British were "better", but there's really no arguing with the achievements of the British in creating the Industrial Revolution, with all the science, engineering, economics and politics that came with it.

But lack of a dominant empire didn't keep France from leading in innovation. Specificially in philosophy (which included science and economics in the 1700s and 1800s) and mathematics, France produced many of the main innovators, including evidently this phonographic pioneer this Slashdot story is about. But by the turn of the 20th Century, that cultural vigor of innovation had died out. France has clearly not lost its full cultural vigor, but it also seems to be focused on conserving the past more than creating the future. Britain, in turn, spent the time from the end of WWI until the 1990s in approximately that same boat.

The US too isn't really in the situation you're describing. The US is not really losing its dominance in innovation, or even in political or economic power, or military power (despite its failure to fight terrorists and guerrillas with massive militaries). Its lead is shrinking, certainly due to some losses by the US, and also by other countries finally catching up after rebuilding first from WWII, then from the Cold War. But the US is still well in the lead of all those competing countries. And the various economic crises looming in the US will affect foreign countries as well, many of them worse than the US. Because the US is so globalized, its crises are global crises. What is lost is the 1990s sense that the US was not just in the lead, but defined every category. Which was brief and always unrealistic.

Also, since France's fall from a frontrunner to an also-ran (still among the top, but towards the back of the upper pack, and mainly adopting innovation from elsewhere) seems linked to losing its colonial status (and getting definitively beaten in several wars that threatened France's entire existence, for 3/4 of a century), while the US didn't really have such an empire to lose (and can regain its market equivalent in any number of ways), they're not parallel.

Well, I guess Slashdot isn't the right place to look for historical insights. Unless It's the history of the phonograph, maybe :).

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[batman14]

French philosophy has been really important during the Enlightenment period.
Jefferson is a perfect example of a guy influenced by the french philosophers from Enlightenment. dixit wikipedia :
Historian Lawrence S. Kaplan notes Jefferson's "visceral support for the French cause,"
Among famous Frenchmen that are linked to the Enlightenment philosophy, you can find Descartes, Rousseau, Diderot, all the Encyclopedists...I let you look through the English version of wikipedia for further details.
At least, you can't possibly study this period without taking into account the influence of French philosophy.

As I'm French, I'm far away from being neutral on this subject.
Nowadays, I may add that France is too influent compared to its size. There are 60 millions souls in France, far away behind the Germans, Japaneses or Americans. So what makes France still be a country that can be in the top ten world leaders ? History and culture. History that we know and the culture that we also all know. This cultural aspect gives another perspective to the occidental world. Even if we are wrong, we got another opinion about how the world must evolve, and as we are arrogant, don't want to be one more clone of the American influent and efficient model.
We haven't planned to take control of the world, nor being the top economic leaders, nor becoming the largest and more devastating army. Lack of ambitions ? Maybe.

Re:What the Hell Happened to the French?

[4D6963]

Well thanks for the history lesson. We do spend much more time at school learning about ancient Greece or the 5th republic than about our conquests outside of Europe I must say. I just concede all points to someone who knows better about the topic than I do, or if you prefer, I surrender ;-).

uh

[ra77le]

something about history being broad gauge gossip or something...tumble, hic!

And the message is...

[ShadowOfMe]

All your recording are belong to moi.
Yes I've read the article and know what the real recording is.
On another topic; isn't what the french guy complaining similar in nature with what we're seeing still to this day with IP lawsuits and such. Isn't that one of the first case of "prior art" ? He invented capturing the sound waves on a medium and while he had not yet found a way to play it back it could have come to him at some point or another.

Sure, next you're going to tell us...

[justfred]

...that a crazy Brazilian invented the airplane, before the Wright Brothers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont
http://www.amazon.com/Wings-Madness-Alberto-Santos-Dumont-Invention/dp/B000FVHJ94

Re:Sure, next you're going to tell us...

[westlake]

...that a crazy Brazilian invented the airplane, before the Wright Brothers.

The Wrights' work is fully documented. You can visit their workshop in Ford's Greenfield Village. You can read their notes, correspondence, etc. You can physically examine and reconstruct their experimental gliders and early aircraft.

Re:Sure, next you're going to tell us...

[justfred]

Yes, but Santos-Dumont make it popular for men to wear wristwatches, and threw "high parties" where everyone sat on chairs 8 feet tall so they could feel what it was like to fly.

Re:Sure, next you're going to tell us...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even crazier, that a New Zealander did it!

Aaah, Tesla

[Digi-John]

He did a lot of cool stuff, like AC, the Tesla coil, etc., but people really hype him too much. He didn't unlock the Secrets of the Universe; those collections of "Tesla's Notes" you buy at Barnes and Noble for $40 will not help you build a flying saucer. Cue 1,000 Free Energy idiots telling me about how Tesla's Crystal Hydrologic Generator or whatever used the power of magnetic fields and crystals to get unlimited energy from regular water. The people who really pump Tesla are also the people who think they can generate unlimited energy through electrolysis of some water, then burning the resulting hydrogen/oxygen mix to get more electricity with which to crack more water, ad infinitum. Yes, I have heard someone tell me all about how he just bought this great book about Tesla and now had plans to do exactly what I just described, and how so many other people had done it but the Evil Oil Companies had sued them/burned down their houses/killed them.

Re:Aaah, Tesla

[Creepy Crawler]

His patents were rather cool..

His master idea of remote energy is also awesome. Or better yet, use towers in the stratosphere to collect energy from the giant earth capicator.

Even our space elevator would use energy coming from connecting upper atmosphere to ground.

Too bad there's a lot of flakes out there. It really smears his name.

Re:Aaah, Tesla

[Digi-John]

Remote energy is cool, but people are afraid of plain old data being sent through the air, much less millions of watts broadcast everywhere. I haven't really looked into Tesla's stuff since about 8th grade so I don't remember much of his specific plans.
I remember being led from Tesla to some huge Free Energy website with hundreds schemes to get free energy, communicate with aliens, keep out the mind control rays, etc.; I'm pretty sure even back then I was able to spot the scientific problems with most of the stuff, but it was cool anyway. They did have some valid things, like running your car on filtered cooking oil and the fact that you *can* get small amounts of electricity from the air with an antenna. There were also a lot of the more typical things, like how to make your car run on liquid water. Anybody else know of that site and if it's still around? Hours of fun :)

Re:Aaah, Tesla

[Creepy Crawler]

IIRC he found a formula for the amount of energy captured with a metal rod X miles high. I have a book with his documents and lab notes that covers exactly that.

He was also working on elecroluminescence, as he considered Edison's tungsten light a waste in thermal energy.

I guess a big concern is what could happen with remote power: we now know the effects of energy through the body, and are still unsure on some frequencies. However, his aha moment came that he realized that only a miniscule amount of energy was lost on world-transmission of power. Only energy that propagated perpendicular to the ionosphere could escape.

His real, studied works are terribly interesting. Just do a patent search for Tesla. I just ignore the kooks.

According to TFA...

[sean.peters]

He spent zero hours trying to devise how to play it back. Scott's purpose was not to record and play back sound, it was to record sound in visual form for some kind of subsequent analysis. It doesn't sound like he ever even conceived of playing it back.

WOM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Summary says:

The archives are on paper and were meant for recording but not playback.

Article says:

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.

Man, such a let down! I was hoping this was the first example of Write-Only-Memory.

I watched this discussion in another forum

[hassanchop]

And ultimately, the best point made in the whole pissing contest essentially said as follows

"I don't care who did it first. I only care who made it something we can actually use, and that it resemble it's present form. That's enough for me to call someone the "Father of" something."

When incrementalism is more common than outright innovation, it's kind of silly to even care about who the father of something is.

Re:edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti

[mc900ftjesus]

Did you type this on a Mac clone or a Mac? Oh wait, Apple has a hardware monopoly. I'll just go load some DRM songs onto my iPod with iTunes I bought from the iTMS, or maybe watch some movies I bought on iTMS on my AppleTV. Or load some programs with iTunes on my iPhone that are Apple Approved(TM).

Man, it's a good thing Jobs encourages nice, open competition with hard ware and software.....

Vendor lock-in is vendor lock-in, DRM is DRM, no matter how transparent.

Re:edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti

[Anonymous Coward]

believe me, in 2108, when someone wikiyahoogoogle's "mp3 player" on their visor computer

I, for one, welcome our future wikiyahoogoogle overlords.

People don't change much

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like the same crap that's on YouTube, except without the accompanying video.

But he's FRENCH

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matter? He's french which means nothing he said, thought or did shall carry any meaning whatsoever because we all know the french are freedom-hating anti-American scum, right? The comments are already full of "I surrender" jokes and other drivel.

Just like every article somehow vaguely regarding China, chinese politics, the chinese space program or the Olympics always degenerates into a "Yay us! America uber alles and everyone else sucks" rally.

Grow up.

Now label me an America-basher and mod me down as usual.

Re:But he's FRENCH

[Anonymous Coward]

Get back to work liberal niggerscum, my boots aren't going to shine themselves.

the french light shines on

[circletimessquare]

it just so happened around the time you imagine the french hit a wall, another light brightened up across the atlantic. so its not a case of their light going out so much as it is a case of their light being outshone. the usa gobbled up the lions share of the glory in the 20th century

but i think you are right that much of french, and european, glory was cut off at the knees by the wars there starting with the crimean war up through world war ii, with the last one being certainly among the worst human decency devouring spectacles the planet has ever put on. and now it's the usa's turn to get mired in war after war, while the glory of china and india grows to take the spotlight and outshine the usa

RIAA sues

[Anonymous Coward]

The RIAA is suing because unauthorized photocopies of the paper recordings were made and distributed to the various scientists.

Funny how it changed

[mapkinase]

In the beginning of the air they first learned how to write the audio and only later how to read it, but now we first got CD players on the market, and only later - CD recorders. I know it's market thing, but I'd rather put a metaphysical twist to it:

Many years ago people used to produce, create stuff themselves rather than consume what others have created for them. Writing was more important. Nowadays it's vice versa.

Transcript

[Dancindan84]

The transcript of his speech writing is said to be:

Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all Historians are still trying to determine the meaning, if any.

Re:He was the first. (OT)

[sm62704]

Wow, my daughter Leila's cat, Shadow, responded to one of my posts!

-mcgrew

PS- Her name is pronounced like the Futurama character's name. She's much older than Futurama, her younger sister just turned 21 (what the link above is about)

Good Story

[MrCopilot]

Beat out again at the hose.

For more info on the phonautogragh see http:http://www.talkingmachine.org/phonautograph.html

OK, sure the guy "recorded" sound, he apparently was very upset that Edison beat him to the patent office and generally received all the glory. Somehow though, I think recording 10 seconds on 2 sheets of paper would make an LP sized recording equivalent to an encyclopedia and thus slightly impractical.
http://mrcopilot.blogspot.com/2008/03/ancient-audio-and-phonautograph.html

Re:Good Story

[MrCopilot]

Whoops, http://www.talkingmachine.org/phonautograph.html

Re:Good Story

[philicorda]

A quite similar device was used in the 1930s-40s called the "Philips-Miller Film Recorder".
http://www.btinternet.com/~roger.beckwith/bh/tapes/pm.htm

It used a film like cinema film, but covered with opaque mecuric sulphide, and a cutting head to scrape away the coating. Apart from using a vertical cut with an oblique head, rather than a lateral one, the principle is the same.
Apparently it was actually pretty good quality!

Re:edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti

[mcmonkey]

i had a 32M rio pmp300 MP3 player in 1998, many years before an iPod was a twinkle in steve job's eye. but the mass of western industrial consumers didn't take portable mp3 players that seriously until steve jobs gave them something gleaming and sexy. such is the way of the world

So we had mp3 players before the iPod, just none as popular.

So, who had light bulbs before Edison? Not, who got one filament to glow that one time, but rather who had developed a reproducible process to create what we would consider a light bulb?

Likewise, what products were on the market for the reproduction of sound before the Edison phonograph? Not, who had a process to produce a lasting physical representation of sound waves, but who had a product to record and reproduce sound? What existing market did the Edison phonograph expand?

Are you BadAnalogyGuy in disguise?

The relationship between this recording device and the phonograph enable for playback of audible sound is nothing like the relationship between early mp3 players and the iPod. The comparisons of Edison and Gates/Jobs in this thread are idiotic. I'm not saying there are no parallels, but the comparisons being made here make no sense.

sacrableu!

[Hasmanean]

Unfortunately, due to the passage of time, the voice on the recording sounded petulant, high-pitched, and whiny. Speculation is that this was due to nonlinear degradation of the recording medium itself.

The gay '90s?

[argent]

Too much absinthe, I think.

actually the analogy make perfect sense

[circletimessquare]

you just somehow believe that revelling in the minor mismatched details of the analogy is somehow valid. everyone is aware of the minor details you allude to, but most people filter out the minor discrepancies in order to see the larger themes. it's a common problem for people with asperger's and autism

that is, some people's minds are equipped with only a flashlight in a dark room. such people like yourself can only point at corners of the room. other people can turn on a light switch and illuminate the entire room. however, the mental strength of asperger's/ autism minds is that that bright flashlight illuminates fine details on a small subject matter, allowing for specialization in a certain mental topic that the average mind cannot achieve. but this strengh comes with the mental weakness of being unable to spot broad parallels and overarching themes and ideas that nonasperger's nonautism sufferers can grasp easily

the average mental skill of broad, but weak illumination is a fundamental need for social skills, and that is why asperger's / autism sufferers can excel at math and science oriented pursuits (pursuits which require a bright spotlight on fine details of a small area) but are unable to be socially adept, always feeling out of joint with what their peers are laughing at, alluding to, are interested in

you of course should feel free to poke holes in my large room/ small flashlight analogy ;-)

Even older sounds

[PapayaSF]

There is an ancient technique for decorating pottery called sgraffito. One of the ways it can be done is to spin a pot on a wheel and slowly move the point of a sharp tool down the outside of the pot, making a long helical groove. Sounds like Edison cylinder recording, doesn't it? I've read that scientists have used lasers to "read" such a groove, and got the sound of the potter's wheel squeaking. More here, including a discussion of a recent hoax. Also, there are rumors that Abraham Lincoln's voice was recorded by phonautograph:

In 1863, nearly 15 years before Thomas Alva Edison created the first phonograph, an inventor named Leon Scott is said to have visited the White House. If historical anecdotes are accurate, he made a tracing of President Lincoln's voice with his newly invented "phonautograph," a machine that scratched sound vibrations onto a soot-blackened sheet of paper wrapped around a drum.

The cylinder on which a paper record of Lincoln's voice was apparently made has never been found.

Re:Even older sounds

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is an ancient technique for decorating pottery called sgraffito. One of the ways it can be done is to spin a pot on a wheel and slowly move the point of a sharp tool down the outside of the pot, making a long helical groove. Sounds like Edison cylinder recording, doesn't it?"

Someone (Murray Leinster?) wrote a story that used this idea 50 or more years ago. I think the story pre-dated lasers, but scientists played audio from a pot that had been made around the time the Christian religion was beginning to displace the older religion.

Bad analogy, no caps either

[jd]

The television was invented by Logi Baird, something every British schoolboy knows. It was colour, too. It wasn't "popularized" back then, but so what? This idea of "an idea whose time has come" doesn't hold water in reality, it's a fiction popularized by marketroids and other non-inventor types to make themselves feel important. Popularizing is inevitable. Once a product exists, people will work on making it cheaper, more practical, more popular. Sooner or later, someone is going to hit on the winning formula. It's inevitable. The initial work? That's not inevitable. Entire human tribes exist where there is no concept of numbers. Numeracy doesn't exist for them. It's not that they have no words for numbers, they cannot recognize quantitative differences at all. (I suspect they now get hired to do market research and opinion polls.) True inventions are extremely rare and not at all guaranteed. They never occur simultaneously in multiple locations, those tend to be innovations from a seed idea that was actually invented some time earlier. Inventions are random mutations of thought. They have building blocks but no true precursor and are spontaneous in nature. If you can name me even ten true inventors, not innovators, you're doing better than most.

Re:Bad analogy, no caps either

[westlake]

The television was invented by Logi Baird, something every British schoolboy knows.

and it had a resolution of about 60-100 lines.

recording and displaying motion video using a spinning disk was a dead end. Baird got his system to air about the same time that all electronic television was making it obsolete.

This artifact represents another

[idontgno]

historical milestone:

meant for recording but not playback.

The first practical implementation of DRM!

Fantastic! They just missed being first!

[hassanchop]

By about 1500 year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuge_Liang

What's that you say? At least they took the first manned balloon flight? Sorry, no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon#Premodern_Balloon

After experimenting with unmanned balloons and flights with animals, the first balloon flight with humans on board took place on October 19, 1783 with the scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, the manufacture manager, Jean-Baptiste Réveillon and Giroud de Villette, at the Folie Titon in Paris. Officially, the first flight was 1 month later, 21 November 1783. King Louis XVI had originally decreed that condemned criminals would be the first pilots, but a young physicist named Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis Francois d'Arlandes successfully petitioned for the honor.

All the Montgolfier's did was make a hot air balloon. The Chinese had done that at least 1500 years earlier.

So what?

[jafiwam]

Early seismometers used lines drawn on glass (recording the sound of the earth) way before this guy. Do those count as "tunes recorded"? So what if it's natural sounds vs. man made sounds.

This is the "first recording" like the first guy to crap in a bucket is the discoverer of the "first toilet"*.

*If someone can come by and cut a hole in the bucket to flush it 150 years later counts as "first toilet".

You can invent all the stuff you want, but unless you are figuring out what to DO with it, or how to market it, it's absolutely meaningless. The first surviving thread gets the credit every time. Go spend some time re-writing history from the Neanderthal point of view or something...

Two parts of recordings

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't matter that the guy recorded sounds before Edison. The fact of the matter is that Edison invented a way of recording a sound AND playing it back. It took how many years to retrieve the other recording? And it took modern electronics too. Remember that for any invention to take root it needs both ingenuity and practicality.

no, innovation is typical, common, a dime a dozen

[circletimessquare]

your glorious numbers were invented independently many times, by many cultures, ever hear of the olmecs, mayans, the aztecs? chinese tally marks? roman numerals versus sanskrit?

here, get some education before asserting the patently false (pun intended ;-)

it is the entirety of putting an innovation to use and mass acceptance of the innovation that makes an innovation matter. what you call marketroid fiction is in fact reality

fundamental technological progress places a cutting edge of minds at the forefront of the next great leap forward. plenty of those minds make lots of false starts and hesitant steps. these sputtering mental forays are what invention and innovation is. it is common, typical, continuous, this process of invention. what is not continuous and typical is the execution of those fledgling ideas into workable products or ideas that are accepted en masse, and alter society forever. this is not invention or innovation thatg changes society and matters then, it is everything that comes after invention that matters: the engineering, finance, mass production or evangleization, and marketing. and it is those steps which forever alter history, not the lonely guy in a garage or shed

meanwhile you live and die by the church of the lone tinkerer as the absolute progenitor of progress. nonsense. inventors are a dime a dozen. here, allow me to dismantle your church of the inventor some more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#History_of_the_light_bulb

In addressing the question "Who invented the incandescent lamp?" historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel [1] list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Swan and Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable. Another historian, Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he invented an entire, integrated system of electric lighting. "The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting." [2] [3]

true inventors champion the identification of what is most important in the facts before them. truly, in the nature of the inventor in you, you can appreciate the fact that the inventor is a minor cog in the engine of progress. he is step abcd. there are many steps abcd that never proceed any further. it is the guy who executes lmnop and gets all the way to wxyz who is the only who really matters in the end

sorry, them's the facts of the reality you live in. i'm sorry reality clashes with your cult of the inventor. you may consider reality to be nothing but a marketroid fiction if coping with reality proves too painful for you if you so desire though

Why did it take so long?

[heroine]

Hard to believe humans couldn't record sound until 1860. Wish someone would describe the reasons it took so long. Unfortunately, no ink recording was made of the great musicians of the time. Used to think ink recording of sound was possible as a child.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[westlake]

Wish someone would describe the reasons it took so long.

Think of how some aboriginal cultures react to a photographic portrait.

The mind has to be open to the idea of the mechanically recorded image or sound.

You have to trust in the machine's ability to replicate the original without harming the original - otherwise, the copy carries with it the taint of black magic, the theft of the soul.

If you think only primitives think this way, consider the ambiguous existence of the animated - and apparently sentient - portraits in Harry Potter.

The unease many people feel when watching or interacting with the almost-but-not-quite lifelike visuals in a CGI game or video.

Don't tell me - he was BLACK!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right?

Google 'black invention myths' while you're at it...

Any of you Slashdot 'right on' sheep dared to watch Fitna yet?
You do know that Geert Wilders has to live 24 hours a day in an army base for protection from the completely sane adherents of the 'religion of peace', don't you.

I mean, it's not as if Mohammed was the anti-Christ, and Allah is Satan, or anything, no sirree...

First...

[jd]

Invention and innovation are two different things. Learn the difference.

Secondly, none of those people invented numbers. Numbers were invented long before the Romans, long before South America was ever inhabited. These cultures merely developed their own representational systems, picked number bases that worked well with what they wanted to do, the things usually associated with innovation, not invention. For that matter, with the exception of a few isolates, most languages have a common ancestor.

Numbers date back past the earliest cave-paintings, where numeracy is clearly demonstrated, placing its invention long before humans migrated through Asia and over the northern land bridge into the Americas. Before cave paintings, there were ritual areas that were used by early humans (and possibly pre-human hominids) that show clear knowledge of counting.

Compared to these, what possible significance can the Toltecs have, or Roman numerals? They adapted a system that was hundreds, if not thousands, of times more ancient than they are to modern civilization. History is big. The South American empires were one, maybe two, thousand years old at most. My old home town has remains over ten thousand years old, and that's relatively modern compared to human existance - humans had reached Britain at least twice prior to that, at least once was before the last wave of ice covered much of the country. Britain itself was occupied only recently, though. Europe was settled very late on and Britain was not much more than some hills in the middle of a plain that included much of what is now the English Channel and Irish Sea.

In other words, spend more time listening and you'll learn more than you can possibly imagine.

uh, what?

[circletimessquare]

numbers were carried over the bering sea and down to mesoamerica? are these the same tribes you refered to in your original comment as without numbers? (snicker)

it's not conceivable to you that numbers were invented at various times by various cultures? if numbers were magically erased from human culture right now, it would be impossible for humankind to reinvent them?

and i take your silence on the light bulb topic as a stubborn man's way of acquiescing to a superior point. i'm sorry i had to be the one to dismantle the essential falsehoods of the cult of the innovator and shatter your illusions

welcome to reality. you previously referred to it as marketroid fiction ;-P

Re:edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti

[CastrTroy]

One thing the iPod did was push the limits of what people expected from an MP3 player. All the other MP3 players at the time only held a very small amount of songs (32 MB), or were extremely large and heavy (from a portable device perspective) device. The iPod, although very expensive, provided the first mp3 device that was actually nice to use. I had an MP3 CDR player, I think even before the iPod came out. It was terrible. It wouldn't read CDRW's unless you rested it on a table (otherwise it would skip), and the battery only lasted about 2-3 hours when playing mp3s.

psst, your ignorance is showing

[Scrameustache]

Other than as art, Scott's work was useless to anyone for over 150 years It was a scientific tool used to record and study sound waves, not a squiggly line art making device.

If copyright laws of now were in effect back then,

[Junior J. Junior III]

Just think, in another 50ish years, the copyright will be expiring.

Do not feed the trolls...

[jd]

Such good advice, pity I never take it. There's something about their delinquent, childish arguing style that makes me think the Victorians may have made a mistake in abandoning the workhouses.

No, these are not the same tribes. The tribes that do not possess numbers are existant now, the tribes that came down to mesoamerica very much are not. Oh, and it wasn't a sea at the time, so quit blathering and grow up. Even a juvenile troll like yourself should be able to comprehend such a trivial thought.

No, it is not conceivable that numbers were invented at various times by various cultures. If numbers were magically erased from human culture right now, it would indeed be impossible for humankind to reinvent them. They would probably invent something that filled a similar role, but they would not be the same thing, nor could they ever be the same.

No, I was thinking about the light bulb topic. The fillament light bulb is but one form of light bulb. Not all light bulbs use fillaments. Do we then say that the fillament light bulb is an invention, or merely an innovation on long-existing techniques for generating light by means of electrical processes? If the latter, then the number of times the light bulb has been developed is of no importance. What is important is that the idea had an origin, the rest is merely evolution. But even evolution has unique paths. No two mutations are absolutely identical. A given mutation, once identified, therefore has one and only one point of origin.

Oh, and your reality is the continuous creation drivel serious science abandoned years ago. Ideas evolve, but all evolution is unique.

Marketing is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you invent it, someone with better marketing just gets remembered.

Konrad Zuse made the first Computer in 1941 but Eniac is most often cited as the first one.
Columbus did "find" America even while there were already people.
etc etc

you are an easy mark

[Scrameustache]

My point was that his Fear was rational. People died accidentally. He wasn't really over exaggerating. During the initial years of electricity distribution, Edison's direct current was the standard for the United States and Edison was not disposed to lose all his patent royalties.

Edison opposed capital punishment, but his desire to disparage the system of alternating current led to the invention of the electric chair. Harold P. Brown, who was at this time being secretly paid by Edison, constructed the first electric chair for the state of New York in order to promote the idea that alternating current was deadlier than DC.

When the chair was first used, on August 6, 1890, the technicians on hand misjudged the voltage needed to kill the condemned prisoner, William Kemmler. The first jolt of electricity was not enough to kill Kemmler, and only left him badly injured. The procedure had to be repeated and a reporter on hand described it as "an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging."

Re:you are an easy mark

[mtgarden]

Meh.

I knew this. As I said, I had been reading about it. Still does not change my position that long before the debate occurred, Edison still feared AC. Yes, he wanted the money and power. Yes, he wasn't perfect. But it wasn't entirely FUD. That's all.

So no, I'm not an easy mark. I just didn't dump all of my knowledge at once as it didn't change my conclusion.

Have a good evening.

Re:you are an easy mark

[Scrameustache]

Edison still feared AC. Yes he did, he was afraid of what it would do to his fortune.

Tell me, do you think he refused to pay Tesla for his work because he was afraid he'd be electrocuted if he honored his agreement?

Re:you are an easy mark

[mtgarden]

Can't say. All I know about Tesla is that after he worked for Edison, he filed 5 patents on AC motors. Tesla later went on to work for Westinghouse (who also bought all 5 of Tesla's patents). I was not aware that Edison and Tesla ever had a disagreement.

wait

[circletimessquare]

"it is not conceivable that numbers were invented at various times by various cultures"

you must be trolling me, right?

Re: [AC] Edison, Newton, Einstein....

[everphilski]

The difference is that what your son produced is indecipherable to anyone, while Scott's recording was coherent;

Without being able to play it back, he could not verify its coherency.

he just lacked the ability to play it back. There is no technology that would be able to decipher your son's scribbles, and none will be invented.

$10 says a contemporary of Scott said the exact same thing.

Something to think about

[Cervantes]

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

Seriously, think about it. This recording was made before computers, planes, cars, conquering the west and subduing the native hordes, NATO, the UN, electricity, The Church of FSM (blessed be his noodly appendage), and just about everything we take for granted today. Someone long forgotten spent a few seconds singing into a weird contraption, and went on to be completely forgotten by history. And now, so very, very long after the fact, we get to hear those few words singing to us across time.

Really, ignore the debate over Edison, the scratchiness, the French jokes, and everything else, and just realize how very haunting it is to hear this forgotten person, on this forgotten recording, from so very, very long ago.

What history did you read???

[Anonymous Coward]

> They practically defined the Enlightenment. Their democratic revolution followed the US lead, and even went so far as to execute their tyrant, not just kick him out.

The French did plenty of great things, but listing the French Revolution among them shows a complete ignorance of how terrible it was.

Re:What history did you read???

[Doc Ruby]

I didn't say it was so great, and even mentioned that it featured executions. But it did finally get rid of a millenium of hereditary monarchy, and pave the way for republican democracy in France.

If you've got a point to make about how the French Revolution was so terrible that it was part of the reason France declined so dramatically in primacy by the 20th Century, then make it. Otherwise, your complaint is irrelevant here. This isn't a referendum on how terrible history's transitions are, but rather a discussion of how France managed to lose its lead.

paper revival

[akirapill]

Thank god, I was waiting for paper records to make a comeback! Nothing beats the warmth and clarity of smoky paper, it's so much better than the cold harshness of vinyl that the modern music industry seems intent on ramming down our throats (haven't these people ever heard of the Vyquist theorem?) Now I finally have an excuse to get all those old 3-ring binders from out of my mom's basement!

Cylindrical Records you say?

[JCSoRocks]

You mean... like this stunning example?

Re:edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti

[Anonymous Coward]

Edison actually bought out a lot of potential competitors too. There were a lot of inventors out there that could have competed with Edison using novel or better variations of an idea, and Edison's patent researchers saw to it that Edison Electric would get those. What worked for Edison is that the other inventors usually had no means of production. (Or Edison could actually block it and deter investment, such as in the AC vs DC debacle.) So by waving a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in front of the other inventors (and this is back when 10 cents could actually buy something), they'd be happy to sell out. Thus Edison would get claim to the invention and make the big money, whether or not he or his company actually invented it. He was a much better businessman than an inventor (he even admitted it with that "99% perspiration 1% inspiration" quote of his - as a good inventor wouldn't have that hard a time), even though history typically doesn't tell about Edison in that regard. So yes, Edison Electric Co. was the MicroSoft of its time.

Capcha=obtains. lol. How appropriate.

If anyone invents GUT as a cookie recipe...

[jstockdale]

If someone creates a cookie recipe that happens to, in several dozen years time, be interpretable as a Grand Unified Theory then there might be some gray area

Then I want a cookie. Probably a damn good cookie at that.

First DRM Recording

[BryanL]

So, is this considered the first DRMed recording? And is there a law suit in the making for its reproduction?

Yes but....

[Whiteox]

So how do you classify music boxes? Piano Rolls??
They are playback devices that use recorded forms as well. They are centuries old.

Psst, your lack of judgement is showing...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a dead-end tool that had no influence on the creation of the phonograph by Edison or more importantly by anyone else. As such, its only use, for over 150 years was as a means of making squiggly lines: art. Instead of claiming that Edison didn't invent the phonograph first, say that Scott did precursor work that was ignored by those that created the oscilloscope, you'd be closer to the truth. As you have contributed nothing of value to slashdot & seem incapable of discerning between ignorance and judgement, I foe'd you to be able to ignore your noise in the future.

TESTA vs. EDISON (prime example)

[Anonymous Coward]

Edison's the PROTOTYPE of "the modern way of doing business" is all.

E.G.-> Look what Edison tried to do to Nikola Tesla (ripping him off)...

Edison stated verbally that he would pay a FAR LARGER SUM than what he offered Tesla for improving Edison's DIRECT CURRENT by iirc, 15%, & Tesla did him even BETTER than that, gaining IIRC, 20% more efficiency from DC!

(Edison burned Tesla, paid him like 1/10th of the original initial agreement...)

Well, enter George Westinghouse:

Westinghouse then picked Tesla up though, because ALTERNATING CURRENT is superior & avoids as many 'repeater stations' being used to counter for signal attenuation which DIRECT CURRENT has "issues" (with needing more repeater stations than alternating current does), & largely succeeded @ doing!

This IS why we run A/C here in the states - better efficiency, less repeater stations required. The brains of Nikola Tesla in motion, clearly showing who was the superior of WHOM, when it came to electrical engineering (& the winner is NOT Thomas Alva Edison).

(Until Tesla's death, he was nearly forgotten in fact, & with REASON (Edison paying off publishing houses & newpapers being one): When Tesla was also awarded the accolade of being the "father of radio" also, posthumously, vs. Marconi!)

HOWEVER, my point is that Edison spent HUGE sums trying to take Tesla "out of the history books" & failed until nearly the end of the last century, but presently in the 21st century, we NOW KNOW, who did what & when, first OR better).

APK

Re:edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't read CDRW's unless you rested it on a table (otherwise it would skip), and the battery only lasted about 2-3 hours when playing mp3s.

That must have been a very crappy early model. My Cd/MP3 player had a decent size buffer (virtually no skipping) and a battery life of 8-10 hours. I had several years really good use out of it.

Not a recording

[secondbase]

I'm wondering why all the back-and-forth about "Which was the first recording?"

This was more analogous to an oscilloscope, not a recorder, in some ways more difficult. Someone give him credit for inventing that.

Re:edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his ti

[nsayer]

Did you type this on a Mac clone or a Mac? I actually typed it on a FreeBSD machine, douchebag.

I'll just go load some DRM songs onto my iPod with iTunes I bought from the iTMS You enjoy that. I filled mine with MP3s I bought from Amazon.