Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (nonfiction)

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (25 April 1817 – 26 April 1879) was a French printer and bookseller who lived in Paris.

As a printer by trade, he was able to read accounts of the latest scientific discoveries and became an inventor. His earliest interest was in an improved form of stenography and he was the author of several papers on shorthand and a history of the subject (1849).

He became interested in recording the sound of human speech in a way similar to that achieved by the then new technology of photography for light and image. He hoped for a form of stenography that could record the whole of a conversation without any omissions.

From 1853 he became fascinated in a mechanical means of transcribing vocal sounds. While proofreading some engravings for a physics textbook, he came across drawings of auditory anatomy. He sought to mimic the working in a mechanical device, substituting an elastic membrane for the tympanum, a series of levers for the ossicle, which moved a stylus he proposed would press on a paper, wood, or glass surface covered in lampblack. On 26 January 1857, he delivered his design in a sealed envelope to the French Academy. On 25 March 1857, he received French patent #17,897/31,470 for the phonautograph.

To collect sound, the phonautograph used a horn attached to a diaphragm which vibrated a stiff bristle which inscribed an image on a lamp black coated, hand-cranked cylinder. Scott built several devices with the help of acoustic instrument maker Rudolph Koenig. Unlike Thomas Edison's later invention of 1877, the phonograph, the phonautograph created only visual images of the sound and did not have the ability to play back its recordings. Scott de Martinville's device was used only for scientific investigations of sound waves.

Scott de Martinville managed to sell several phonautographs to scientific laboratories for use in the investigation of sound. It proved useful in the study of vowel sounds and was used by Franciscus Donders, Heinrich Schneebeli and Rene Marage. It also initiated further research into tools able to image sound such as Koenig's manometric flame. He was not, however, able to profit from his invention and spent the remainder of his life as a librarian and bookseller at 9 Rue Vivienne in Paris.

He also became interested in the relationship between linguistics, people's names and their character and published a paper on the subject (1857).

In 2008, The New York Times reported the playback of a phonautogram recorded by Scott de Martinville on 9 April 1860. The recording was converted from "squiggles on paper" to a playable digital audio file by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Mathematician (nonfiction)
• Photography (nonfiction)
• Rudolph Koenig (nonfiction)
• Thomas Edison (nonfiction)

Nonfiction cross-reference

External links:

• Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville @ Wikipedia