The earliest recognizable recording of a human voice was made on April 9, 1860, as a line scratched into soot on paper. It wasn't turned back into sound until 2008.

On April 9, 1860, a phonautograph captured a performance of 'Au Clair de la Lune.' It is the earliest clearly recognizable record of a human voice yet recovered.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph created visual recordings of sound. A needle that moved in response to sound etched the waves into paper coated with soot from an oil lamp. It was built to draw sound, not to play it back.

Heard again

In 2008, the First Sounds collaborative released sound files made with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's virtual stylus technology, which reads the tracings optically. Berkeley Lab scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell did the work, the Associated Press reported.