Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville

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Leon Scott, the inventor of the phonautograph

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (born April 25, 1817 in Paris, † April 26, 1879 in Paris) was a French printer and bookseller living in Paris and is considered to be the inventor of the phonautograph .

Life

In 1857 he invented the first known device for recording sound, which he called the "phonautograph". In order to make sound visible, the phonautograph used a horn that was connected to a membrane , which created an image on a hand-cranked cylinder using a pig's bristle located there . Scott built several devices with the help of Rudolph Koenig , a local precision mechanics instrument maker. In contrast to the similar phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison in 1877 , the phonautograph was unable to reproduce the audiovisual recordings. Scott's invention was used solely for the scientific study of the representation of sound waves , but not for the reproduction and marketing of sound recordings, as Edison later practiced. Because it was used as an acoustic measuring instrument, in addition to the vibrations transmitted via the air, the vibrations of a tuning fork were recorded on a parallel track . This second track should be helpful for the later conversion of the lines into audible tones, since fluctuations in the sound track could be calculated due to the known constant frequency of the tuning fork.

Scott also published a book on the history of shorthand . In a retrospective 20 years later (1878) he reviled Edison: he had appropriated his (Scott's) methods and misused the recording technology. The goal is namely to write down language ( phonography ) and not to reproduce sounds. "What are the inventor's rights over those of the improver?" He wrote less than a year before his death. "Come on, citizens of Paris, let's not take our prize away from us."

In 2007, the historians David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster discovered two phonautographs recorded by Scott in the documents of the French Patent Office from the years 1857 and 1859, which, however, were graphically distorted to be converted into tones. At the beginning of 2008, further phonautograms from 1860 were found in the archives of the Académie des Sciences , which Carl Haber and Earl Cornell of the Berkeley National Laboratory in California were able to reconstruct. One of these graphical records is dated April 9, 1860 and shows 10 seconds of the folk song Au clair de la lune . Due to unclear information in the original documents, an incorrect frequency of the reference track was initially assumed, which is why the voice was assigned to a woman; the inventor's can actually be heard.

Another find in the archives of the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale contains recordings from autumn 1857 and made it possible to reconstruct the earliest recordings of sound waves transmitted over the air, a scale played on a cornet .

Various records from the period 1853 to 1860 was in 2015 by the UNESCO for World Soundtrack Awards explained. However, these recordings were not submitted by France, but by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). The legacy is not attributed to France.

Web links

Commons : Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrich Stock: Der Klangfotograf , Zeit Online , March 15, 2007
  2. ↑ a b c Publications :: FirstSounds.ORG. In: www.firstsounds.org. Retrieved May 12, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Facsimile " Leproblemème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même " (p. 5)
  4. ↑ SpiegelOnline of March 27, 2008
  5. ↑ Humanity's First Recordings of its Own Voice: The Phonautograms of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (c.1853-1860). UNESCO Memory of the World, accessed August 31, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Scott de Martinville, Édouard-Léon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Scott, Leon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French inventor
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1817
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 1879
Place of death Paris