Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville | |
|---|---|
| Born | Template:Birth date Paris, France |
| Died | April 26, 1879 (aged 62) |
| Occupation(s) | Inventor, printer, bookseller |
| Known for | Creating the earliest sound recording apparatus, the phonautograph |
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (25 April 1817 – 26 April 1879) was a French inventor, printer, and bookseller.
He is credited with creating the earliest sound recording apparatus known as the phonautograph, for which he secured a patent in France on 25 March 1857.
Early years
Scott de Martinville, working as a printer, closely followed developments in science and ventured into invention. His objective was to capture human speech in a manner comparable to how photography records images. He envisioned a system of stenography capable of documenting entire spoken dialogues. In 1849, he published several articles on the history and techniques of shorthand. He was married twice and fathered six children.
Phonautograph
Beginning in 1853, Scott concentrated on mechanically capturing vocal sounds. Drawing inspiration from anatomical illustrations of the ear, he devised a mechanism that substituted the tympanum with a flexible membrane and replaced the ossicles with levers that moved a stylus to trace sound vibrations onto lampblack-coated surfaces. On 26 January 1857, he presented this invention to the Académie Française and was granted French patent numbers #17,897/31,470 on 25 March 1857.
His phonautograph consisted of a horn connected to a diaphragm that vibrated a stiff bristle, which then inscribed sound waves onto a hand-turned cylinder covered with lampblack. Scott partnered with acoustic instrument maker Rudolph Koenig to produce multiple units. Unlike Thomas Edison’s phonograph from 1877, Scott’s device only created visual representations of sound without any playback function; his intention was for these waveforms to be interpreted similarly to written text, though this proved impractical.
Scott sold several phonautographs to scientific institutions investigating vowel sounds, with researchers such as Franciscus Donders, Heinrich Schneebeli, and Rene Marage utilizing them. The invention also inspired advancements like Koenig's manometric flame apparatus. Despite its scientific importance, Scott did not earn financial rewards from his creation and spent his later years as a bookseller at 9 Rue Vivienne in Paris.
Additionally, he investigated linguistics and name-based character analysis, releasing a paper on the topic in 1857.
Rediscovery of the Au clair de la lune recording
In 2008, The New York Times announced the successful playback of a phonautogram recorded on 9 April 1860. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory employed IRENE technology to transform the "scribbles on paper" into a digital audio file.
Initially played back at an incorrect speed suggesting a brief ten-second clip of a woman or child singing, subsequent adjustment revealed a twenty-second recording featuring a man—most likely Scott himself—singing Au clair de la lune slowly. This stands as the oldest intelligible audio recording of singing, predating Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder phonograph recordings from 1888 by twenty-eight years.
Additional recordings
Another phonautogram by Scott contains the opening verses of Torquato Tasso's pastoral play Aminta, recorded circa 1860, representing the earliest known intelligible human speech recording. While earlier phonautograms from 1857 exist, they consist of unintelligible fragments; notably, one cornet scale recording from that year has been restored, and recordings from experiments dating back to 1853 have been preserved.
In recognition of their cultural, historical, and artistic importance, Scott’s phonautograms were selected by the Library of Congress in 2010 for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.
Myth of Abraham Lincoln's voice recording
Assertions that Scott's phonautograph captured the voice of Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1863 are unsubstantiated. Since Scott never traveled to the United States during the 1860s, such a recording could not have been made.
Works
- Jugement d'un ouvrier sur les romans et les feuilletons à l'occasion de Ferrand et Mariette (1847)
- Histoire de la sténographie depuis les temps anciens jusqu'à nos jours (1849)
- Les Noms de baptême et les prénoms (1857)
- Fixation graphique de la voix (1857)
- Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Adolphe-Noël Desvergers
- Essai de classification méthodique et synoptique des romans de chevalerie inédits et publiés (1870)
- Le Problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même. La France, l'Amérique (1878)
Additional reading
- Helmholtz, Hermann. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Translated by Alexander J. Ellis. London: Longmans, Green, 1875, p. 20.
- Marco, Guy A., editor. Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound in the United States. New York: Garland, 1993, p. 615.
- Winston, Brian. Media Technology and Society: a History from the Telegraph to the Internet. New York: Routledge, 1998.