The Phonautograph of Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

This is simply the cools it’s thing I’ve seen all week. Yes, I think it even tops the Two o’Clock Titty.

The image below is a “phonautograph”machine invested in 1860, 17 before Edison and and his wax cylinders, by a French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.

It was invented to transcribe sounds onto paper by etching soot covered paper with a stylus. Edouard-Leon never had any intention of playing these sounds back — he was interested in shapes of the waveforms.

Now, this alone is very cool but what is even cooler is that some scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, here in CA, have recently created a digital scan of one of his “recordings” and then used a computer to recover the original signal — the inventor singing “Au Clair de la Lune.”

You can read more and hear the audio (which you must) over at the BBC.

Update:  I also found this New York Times piece on the Phonautograph.

This has struck a chord with a few other ideas that came into my head while working on the Dihemispheric Chronaether Agitator. More to come.

Thanks Benna!