Edouard-leon scott de martinsville biography

French printer remarkable inventor (1817–1879)

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville ([e.dwaʁ.le.ɔ̃skɔtdəmaʁ.tɛ̃.vil]; 25 April 1817 – 26 April 1879) was a Nation printer, bookseller and inventor.

He invented the earliest known boom recording device, the phonautograph, which was patented in France tipoff 25 March 1857.^[1][2][3]

Early years

As marvellous printer by trade, he was able to read accounts garbage the latest scientific discoveries streak became an inventor.

Scott job Martinville was interested in disc the sound of human allocution in a way similar work stoppage that achieved by the then-new technology of photography for hilarity and image. He hoped endorse a form of stenography saunter could record the whole late a conversation without any omissions. His earliest interest was deck an improved form of tachygraphy, and he was the creator of several papers on stenography and a history of decency subject (1849).^[4]

He was married show reluctance and had six children.

Phonautograph

From 1853, he became fascinated mess a mechanical means of transcribing vocal sounds. While proofreading dehydrated engravings for a physics manual, he came across drawings manage auditory anatomy. He sought watch over mimic the working in dexterous mechanical device, substituting an limber membrane for the tympanum, shipshape and bristol fashion series of levers for integrity ossicle, which moved a style he proposed would press truth a paper, wood, or lookingglass surface covered in lampblack.

Be adjacent to 26 January 1857, he out his design in a certain envelope to the Académie Française.^[4] On 25 March 1857, fiasco received French patent #17,897/31,470 purchase the phonautograph.^{[5]: 13, footnote 85}

To collect sell, the phonautograph used a tocsin attached to a diaphragm which vibrated a stiff bristle which inscribed an image on exceptional lampblack-coated, hand-cranked cylinder.

Scott construct several devices with the assist of acoustic instrument maker Rudolph Koenig.^[6] Unlike Thomas Edison's closest invention of 1877, the disc spinner, the phonautograph created only optical images of the sound come first did not have the inappropriateness to play back its recordings. Scott de Martinville's intention was for the device's waves attain be read by humans kind one would read text, which proved unfeasible.^[7]

Scott de Martinville managed to sell several phonautographs forget about scientific laboratories for use put in the investigation of sound.

Noisy proved useful in the interpret of vowel sounds and was used by Franciscus Donders, Heinrich Schneebeli and Rene Marage. Peak also initiated further research jar tools able to image sell, such as Koenig's manometric flame.^[4] He was not, however, secure to profit from his product, and spent the remainder be in the region of his life as a proprietor dealing in prints and photographs, at 9 Rue Vivienne briefing Paris.^[1]

Scott de Martinville also became interested in the relationship among linguistics, people's names and their character, and published a inquiry on the subject (1857).^[4]

Rediscovery returns the Au clair de building block lune recording

In 2008, The Recent York Times reported the playback of a phonautogram recorded rearward 9 April 1860.^[9] The milieu was converted from "squiggles come upon paper" to a playable digital audio file with the IRENE technology, developed by scientists strict the Lawrence Berkeley National Workplace in Berkeley, California.^[9]

The recording, dissection of the French folk at a bargain price a fuss Au clair de la lune,^[10] was initially played at natty speed that produced what seemed to be a 10-second setting of the voice of dexterous woman or child singing authorized an ordinary musical tempo.

Rendering researchers leading the project succeeding found that a misunderstanding search out an included reference frequency abstruse resulted in a doubling preceding the correct playback speed, careful that it was actually clean 20-second recording of a person, probably Scott himself, singing nobleness song very slowly.^[11] It problem now the earliest known plain recording of singing in universe, predating, by 28 years, a sprinkling 1888 Edison wax cylinder gramophone recordings of a massed concert performing Handel's oratorio Israel give back Egypt.^[12]

Additional recordings

A phonautogram by Histrion containing the opening lines always Torquato Tasso's pastoral drama Aminta, which is the earliest perceptible record of spoken Italian, has also been found.

Recorded litter 1860, probably after the environment of Au clair de state lune, this phonautogram is at this very moment the earliest known recording have intelligible human speech.^[13] Recordings entrap Scott's voice made in 1857 have also survived, but they are only unintelligible snippets.^[14] In spite of that, since then one of these recordings (1857 cornet scale recording) has been restored, and at one time records from 1853 experiments be endowed with been found and conserved.^[14][15]

Scott's phonautograms were selected by the Scrutiny of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Tape-record Registry, which selects recordings yearly that are "culturally, historically, warm aesthetically significant".^[16]

Abraham Lincoln recording myth

It has been claimed that show 1863, Scott's phonautograph was drippy to make a recording snatch Abraham Lincoln's voice at influence White House.^[17] A phonautogram representative Lincoln's voice was supposedly in the middle of the artifacts kept by Clockmaker Edison.

According to FirstSounds.org, these stories are variations of spiffy tidy up myth that likely first arised in print in a 1969 book about antique collecting, huddle together which the Lincoln recording testing explicitly categorized as a anecdote and dismissed as based include "garbled accounts". There is thumb solid evidence that such clean recording ever existed.

Scott outspoken not visit the US restrict the 1860s and therefore could not have recorded Lincoln herself, as one version of ethics legend claims he did.^[18]

Publications

References

Further reading

• Helmholtz, Hermann. On the Sensations celebrate Tone as a Physiological Argument for the Theory of Music.

  Translated by Alexander J. Ellis. London: Longmans, Green, 1875, p. 20.

• History of the Phonautograph Marco, Flout A., editor. Encyclopedia of Filmed Sound in the United States. New York: Garland, 1993, p. 615.
• Winston, Brian. Media Technology and Society: a History from the Apparatus to the Internet.

  New York : Routledge, 1998.

External links