Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
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.
Edison’s legacy is safe, though: the machine used to record this pre-Edison tune was “a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back.”
