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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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" ?

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[Jesus_666]

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

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?

[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?

[noidentity]

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

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.

[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."

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!"

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.

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....

[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....

[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: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.

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:So...

[dex22]

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

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.

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

[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

[oldhack]

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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: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: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: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.

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

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.

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.

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.