Phonautograph

A Phonautograph ( neologism from ancient Greek φωνή phoné "tone", αὐτός cars, " self " and γράφειν gráphein "write"; literally so Tonselbstschreiber ) is a device for graphical recording of sound.

The first Phonautograph was constructed in 1857 by Édouard -Léon Scott de Martinville. He used a funnel connected to a diaphragm to make sound visible. By means of a membrane attached to the pig bristle was created on one with a hand crank driven, blackened cylinder of glass is a graphic recording of the amplitude- time course. The instrument makers and acoustician Rudolph Koenig, who was involved in the realization of the system, developed in 1862 more devices, in which a gas flame was modulated by sound collected in a hopper. The light emanating from the flame light is then projected to a rotatable mirror. Twelve years later, Alexander Graham Bell constructed a Phonautographen who recorded the sound with the help of a corpse taken from the ear and recorded on a soot-covered metal cylinder to the optical view.

At a sound was not thought of; neither with the device itself (such as the phonograph ), nor was there a particular player, because it should only the composition of the sound to be visually recognizable. Only in 2008 could a sound recording that Phonautographen reconstructed by 1860 and become audible, so Scott can be attributed to the oldest known " sound recording ".