First Recorded Voice

April 9, 1860 - It was on this day that a French printer and bookseller named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded his voice on an invention he created called the phonoautograph.

The idea of the phonoautograph was to create a visual image of sounds, but it did not have the ability to recreate the sounds.

147 years later, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory figured out a way to take one of Scott de Martinville's phonoautograms and convert it into a recording that could be played back.

The 10-second snippet of a man singing Au Clair de la Lune is the oldest known recorded sound of a human voice.