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The record. A recording was made with no way to pay it back to test the method. Now we can play the surviving recordings back.
"The sound files of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograms were created using the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's virtual stylus technology, which sought to track the soot-scratched wavy lines as though they were standard record grooves. However, Scott didn?t intend his phonautograms to be played back. Scott recorded the French folksong "Au Clair de la Lune" on April 9, 1860, and deposited the results with the Académie des Sciences in 1861. It remains the earliest clearly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered. The words have been a matter of controversy, but the latest playback?unveiled in May 2010?establishes them as ?Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prête moi?,? rather than ?Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit,? as originally announced. The latest work also reveals that Scott had allowed the cylinder to slow down?possibly to a complete stop?between the words ?Pierrot? and ?prête,? perhaps indicating a pause to check how much unrecorded space was left on the sheet.
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