In the middle of heavy sniper fire and other such lies, i saw a nice little story about us. Us= humans.
Apparently a french man called Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded a short part of a song. And this happened in 1860!
Before this discovery the title was owned by Thomas Alva Edison, but he made his recording in 1877.
Follow the sound of a phonograph..
And hereit is, the oldest recorded sound made by a human.
There is of course more to this:
In 2008, the New York Times reported the discovery of a phonautograph from April 9, 1860.[2] The announcement of the discovery was accompanied by an announcement that the visual recording was made playable — "converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California."[2] The phonautograph was one of Leon Scott's forgotten images in Paris; they were scanned then processed by a sophisticated computer program developed a few years earlier by the Library of Congress.
Source: Wikipedia
The inventor never had a chance to hear this recording, his machine only recorded the sound. It took lot of research and work to make it work in 2008.
Here is the NY Times story.
In his memoir, Scott scorned his American rival Edison and made brazen appeals to French nationalism. "What are the rights of the discoverer versus the improver?" he wrote less than a year before his death in 1879. "Come, Parisians, don’t let them take our prize."
Well, Scott was the first, so i won't take it away from him. Of course Edison was a giant, but this is a game he lost.
The whole story of this research is interesting (to me), especially the fact it was an American team that made this discovery.
The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr. Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on the Archeophone album "Actionable Offenses," a collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Mr. Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the world’s oldest recorded sounds, Mr. Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott’s phonautograms.
NYT
Can't quote much more, but the NYT link tells the story.
And now, get back to the foxholes and pray!