from Wikipedia:
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (1817 – April 26, 1879) was a French printer, librarian, and bookseller who lived in Paris. He invented the earliest extant sound recording device, the phonautograph, which was patented on March 25, 1857, as French patent 17,897/31,470. The phonautograph used a horn to collect sound, 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 Rudolph Koenig, a local musical instrument maker. Unlike Edison’s similar 1877 invention, the phonograph, the phonautograph only created visual images of the sound and did not have the ability to play back its recordings. Scott’s device was used for scientific investigations of sound waves.
In 2008, the New York Times reported the discovery of a phonautograph from April 9, 1860. The announcement of the discovery was accompanied by an announcement that the visual recording was made playable — "converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California." The phonautograph was one of Leon Scott’s forgotten images in Paris; they were scanned then processed by a sophisticated computer program developed a few years earlier by the Library of Congress.
The recording was a ten-second snippet of a singer performing the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.†This phonautograph recording is now the earliest known recording of a human voice and the earliest known recording of music in existence, predating Edison’s phonographic recording of a Handel chorus by nearly two decades.
Of further interest, indeed the Holy Grail of archaeophonographic pursuit, is the somewhat apocryphal Lincoln Recording supposedly made in Washington D.C. in 1863 using Scott’s Phonautograph. It is unclear at present whether this recording was actually made, but a phonautographic tracing of Lincoln was supposedly included among the artifacts kept by Edison.
