Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Not really. Edison was able to play his recordings, which this Frenchman apparently wasn't able to do.
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
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
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.
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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!
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.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
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.
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.
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.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
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.
You just got troll'd!