11 October

This is the first ever recording of a human voice, on April 9, 1860. The voice is Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who also invented the device which recorded it, which he called a phonautograph. The device took sound waves and let them move a stylus/pen over soot-covered paper. It was never designed to play back sound, only to study properties of sound waves, but modern scientists realised they could take these basic scribbles and turn them back into the original sounds. Quality is not great (he’s singing a French tune, Au Clair de Lune), but it’s the otherworldly quality of these earliest recordings which highlights the miracle of how what we take to be separate things - sounds and scribbles they cause on a piece of paper - are not at all. It’s easy enough to build these machines, but the traditional science won’t explain *why* they work.