History of Technologies for Recording Music


The Phonautograph



Bell’s ear Phonautograph was a very unusual variation on the basic technology. The recording mechanism was the human ear. By removing a chunk of skull including the inner ear from a human cadaver, and attaching a stylus to the moving parts of the ear, he was able to use this bio-mechanical device to make a recording of the sounds that entered a recording horn. It recorded on a moving glass strip, coated with a film of carbon, so there are probably no original recordings from it. When he learned of the invention of the phonograph, Bell wondered why he didn’t think of it himself.

Several researchers have investigated the possibility of using modern technology to reproduce these pre-Edison recordings, especially following the claim (probably false) that a recording of Lincoln’s voice might exist. However, no one has yet been successful. A small collection of original Phonautograph recordings dating from the post-phonograph period is held by the Edison National Historic Site, but in part due to their poor quality, a signal processing engineer commissioned by the IEEE History Center was unable to extract any sounds from them.

Leave a Reply
