The First Man To Record Sound

Do you know who recorded the first-ever sound?

If you answered, ‘Thomas Edison’, you are mistaken! It was actually a bookseller in Paris, in the mid-1800s. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented a device called the Phonautograph, which recorded audio. He never considered that the sound could be played back, he simply wanted to record speech with the intent of reading it back instead. History was not kind to him, as Thomas Edison stole his thunder 20 years later. 

Over a century later, we unearth his long-forgotten recordings, and celebrate the real inventor of sound recording.

This Great Big Story is sponsored by Overtune.

Download Overtune, the world’s simplest music creation app, on the App Store:  https://overtune.app.link/overtune