His fear was not unfounded, though as Conan O’Brien, of all people, mused, “eventually, all our graves go unattended.”īut Léon Scott got a second act, as did several unidentified long-dead humans whose voices he had recorded, when Dr. He was pained by the global acclaim that greeted Edison’s phonograph 21 years later, fearing that his own name would be lost to history. …in terms of what we’re talking about here visually, anybody who’s ever used audio editing software should have a pretty good idea of what we’re talking about here, that kind of wavy line that you see on your screen that somehow corresponds to a sound file that you’re working with…He was hoping people would learn to read those squiggles and not just get the words out of them.Īlthough Léon Scott managed to sell a few phonautographs to scientific laboratories, the general public took little note of his invention.

It was, in the words of audio historian Patrick Feaster, the “ultimate speech-to-text machine.”Īs he told NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Léon Scott was driven to “get sounds down on paper where he could look at them and study them:” Léon Scott’s vision for his phonautograph reflects his preoccupation with the science of sound.Ī professional typesetter, with an interest in shorthand, he conceived of the phonautograph as an artificial ear capable of reproducing every hiccup and quirk of pronunciation far more faithfully than a stenographer ever could. A means of capturing precious family memories.A record of telephone conversations.An academic resource of archived lectures.A device for creating audiobooks for blind people.That honor goes to Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, whose phonautograph, patented in 1857, transcribed vocal sounds as wave forms etched onto lampblack-coated paper, wood, or glass.Įdison’s plans for his invention hinged on its ability to reproduce sound in ways that would be familiar and of service to the listening public. His achievement was a game changer, obviously, but it wasn’t the first time human speech was successfully recorded, as Kings and Things clarifies in the above video. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.

The great inventor later reminisced that he “was never so taken aback” in his life as when he first heard his own voice, issuing forth from the phonograph into which he’d so recently shouted the famous nursery rhyme:Įverybody was astonished. Apparently Edison got it in the can on the first take.

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