SOUND RECORDING HISTORY

It all began in 1857 when French printer and bookseller Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the first sound recording device in Paris. Called Phonautograph, this device had the capability to detect amplitudes of the sound by mimicking the architecture of our own human ears (gathering chamber where sound is focused into one spot, where diaphragm collected the vibrations of the sound and transferred those vibration to the moving stylus who pressed the ink on the moving paper). Although his design was intended only for recording information about speech structure onto the paper and did not have any playback capabilities, his efforts greatly inspired the work of future inventors.