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The Earliest Vehicle: Seeing Sound

In 1857, a French scientist named Leon Scott invented a machine called the ‘acoustic vibrometer’. This machine was the originator of the tape recorder. We know that sound is produced by vibration, and this machine, through a layer of membrane that vibrates with sound waves like the eardrum of the human ear, and a pig bristle, could convert the energy produced by sound vibration into a thin, twisted line, which was inscribed on a piece of soot paper. It was the first time that man had transformed hearing into sight. This acoustic vibrometer, however, merely recorded the fluctuations of sound on a flat surface; it did not play them back. Fast forward 20 years to 1877, and Thomas Edison, the man who invented the light bulb and the telephone, was working in his laboratory on ways to improve telephone and telegraph technology when he observed that a vibrating diaphragm caused the tip of a needle to leave traces on a soft surface when sound was passed through a telephone microphone. He then thought that if he could find a way to record these traces and make them playable, it would be possible to invent a machine for recording and replaying sound. He then embarked on a series of experiments with his assistants, and finally invented the phonograph, the first tape recorder in the true sense of the word for human beings.
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