Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville

Édouard -Léon Scott de Martinville ( born April 25, 1817 in Paris, † April 26, 1879 in Paris) was a French living in Paris printers and booksellers and is considered the inventor of the Phonautographen.

Life

He invented in 1857 the first known device for recording sound, which he called " Phonautograph ". In order to make sound visible, the Phonautograph used a horn that was attached to a membrane, which created an image by means of a pig bristle located there on a handgekurbelten cylinder. Scott built with the help of Rudolph Koenig, a local precision engineering instrument maker, multiple devices. In contrast to the similar, by Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 the Phonautograph was not able to reproduce the audio-visual recordings. Scott's invention was used solely for scientific studies of the representation of sound waves, but not for reproduction and marketing of sound recordings, as it later Edison practiced.

Scott also published a book on the history of shorthand. In a 20-year retrospective later (1878 ) he reviled Edison: This had appropriated his ( Scott's ) methods and abusing the recording technique. The aim is namely to write language ( phonography ) and do not reproduce sounds. "What are the rights of the inventor against those of improver? " He wrote less than a year before his death. "Come, citizens of Paris, let them not take away our price us."

In 2007, the historian David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster found in the documents of the French Patent Office for two recorded by Scott Phonautogramme from the years 1857 and 1859, although they were wrong. In early 2008 the sciences more Phonautogramme were found from later years, then in the archives of the Académie, which could be reconstructed by Carl Haber and Earl Cornell from the Berkeley National Laboratory in California. One of these graphic records, is considered the oldest known Tonschwingungsaufzeichnung, dated April 9, 1860 and shows 10 seconds of the folk song Au clair de la lune.