The oldest recordings of a human voice waited 150 years to be heard
In 1857 a Parisian inventor captured sound waves as wavy lines scratched through soot on paper. His machine could record but never play back; it was meant only for looking at sound. In 2008, researchers scanned an 1860 sheet of those lines and used software to turn them into audio, and a French folk song emerged.
Music had been stored long before sound itself. In the ninth century the Banū Mūsā brothers built a water-powered organ that played swappable cylinders studded with pins, and that basic idea drove mechanical music for roughly a thousand years, through Flemish bell-ringers, barrel organs, musical clocks and music boxes. Player pianos read punched paper rolls, and from 1904 a special piano could punch a master roll as a pianist actually played, preserving a real performance. In 1902 alone, American factories turned out up to 75,000 player pianos.
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph was the first device to capture actual sound from the air. Thomas Edison went further in 1877 with the phonograph cylinder, the first practical machine that could both record and replay. Emile Berliner's flat gramophone disc, patented in 1887, proved easier to make, ship and store, and was slightly louder too; discs outsold cylinders from around 1910.
The standard shellac record spun at nominally 78 revolutions per minute, but not quite the same everywhere: 78.26 in America and 77.92 elsewhere. The gap came from differing mains electricity frequencies, which ran the strobe lights used to calibrate turntables and recording lathes. Vinyl long-players arrived from Columbia in 1948 and RCA Victor's 45 rpm single a year later, and together they had pushed the fragile 78 aside in most developed countries by the end of the 1950s. Vinyl was sold as unbreakable, which it was not, though it was far tougher than shellac.
Early recording was purely mechanical, and very low and very high notes simply did not register. Electrical recording, using microphones and amplifiers, changed that in the 1920s. The first such disc released to the public captured the 1920 funeral of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey, made with four telephone-style microphones wired to a van outside.
Source: Sound recording and reproduction
