Is It Time For Tom Edison To Step Aside -- Or Not?
"New York - 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.
"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.
"But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable - converted from squiggles on paper to sound - by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif."
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