Thomas Edison is credited with the invention of the phonograph and widely believed to have made the first recording of the human voice in 1877 of him singing a child’s song. However, it seems Edison wasn’t the first to have recorded the human voice.

A short song was captured by a Parisian inventor named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860. The inventor used a device called a phonautograph. The device captured representations of sound waves on a piece of paper coated in soot from an oil lamp.

Some reports say that the soot based recordings weren’t made to be played back, but were made to simply study the visual representation of the sound waves. Edison is the first person to record and playback a recording of a human voice.

Via BBC News