Earliest Audio Recording

For years now people have thought that the first audio recording came with Thomas Edison's patent of the phonograph. This has been proved wrong. There is a recording of the song Au Clair de la Lune that is said to be from 1860. That is 17 years before Edison's patented phonograph.

The recording is etched into paper and the LA Times says, "Using technology originally designed to play records without touching them, a team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was able to convert a series of squiggly lines etched onto smoked paper into an ethereal voice singing 'Au Clair de la Lune, Pierrot répondit,' a refrain from a French folk song." Researchers say that there are "other phonautograms that date even earlier, but Scott had not yet perfected his device at that point, they said, and the recordings produce only squawks."
Go to this site to hear the recording. (Keep in mind that it is noisy...what do you expect from the first audio recording? It sounds like someone outside on a very windy day.)

To read the full article from the LA Times go here.