The First Sound Recorder Could Not Play

Invented in 1857, the phonautograph captured sound waves on smoke-covered glass, but it was physically impossible to play the audio back. It was intended only to visualize sound, not to hear it.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created this device decades before Edison invented the phonograph. He recorded speech and singing as wiggly lines on paper, essentially creating a visual map of sound. He dreamed that one day we would be able to play these recordings back, but he lacked the technology to turn those lines back into noise. In 2008, scientists finally scanned his paper traces and successfully played back the oldest recorded human voice in history.