Audio historians have found a sound recording that predates Edison's phonograph by nearly 20 years. The "phonautograph" was patented in 1857 by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville; the device recorded ...

Do you have a question about history? Send us your question at history@time .com and you might find your answer in a future edition of Now You Know. The question of which sound was the first ever to ...

The voice of an unknown woman singing in a lamp-lit Paris laboratory nearly 150 years ago came to life Friday amid the crackles and buzz of a historic breakthrough recording made 17 years before ...

The oldest playable recording of an American voice was to make its second public debut Friday when a newly digitized version is played at a theater in Schenectady, N.Y. The first playback took place ...

At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble doesn't sound like much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest-known recorded human voice. The 10-second clip of a woman ...

*Google Translator tackles a French website. France was the Japan-Galapagos-Islands of the 19th century. The first record of votes in the world in 1860 "The song "Au clair de la lune" was recorded in ...

Much of early American music is lost. However, the Digital Library of Appalachia, a collaboration between several member libraries, has an online repository of Appalachian music dating from the 1930s ...

The question of which sound was the first ever to be recorded seems to have a pretty straightforward answer. It was captured in Paris by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the late 1850s, nearly two ...

A sketch of an 1859 model of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph. The oldest playable recording of an American voice will make its second public debut today (Oct. 26), when a newly ...

The oldest playable recording of an American voice will make its second public debut today (Oct. 26), when a newly digitized version is played at a theater in Schenectady, N.Y. The first playback took ...