Today we have the iPod, but 150 years ago they had the phonautograph. What’s that?! The phonautograph is the first recording device in the world. Invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, the phonautograph had been a mystery. It recorded sounds, but it couldn’t play them.

A team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, have decoded the first song ever recorded on April 9, 1860. It is called ‘Au Clair de la Lune’. The discovery is historic, as everybody knew that Thomas Edison was the inventor of recorded sounds. However, Scott’s phonautograph had been invented 17 years before Edison patented its phonograph.

Listen here the first recorded sound that can be played. David Giovannoni, an American audio historian, has also presented recordings made in 1853 and 1854, but those attempts of capturing sounds have a poor quality, because Scott’s machine wasn’t calibrated at that time. How would look gadgets in 150 years from now?

via NY Times