Before Edison

Earlier this year, Northampton-based science journalist Seth Shulman informed us that Boston's Alexander Graham Bell probably didn't invent the telephone. His new book, "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," marshals an impressive amount of circumstantial evidence in order to demonstrate that Bell's lawyer had somehow induced a clerk at the patent office in Washington, DC, to show or describe to him a schematic drawing by Elisha Gray, an electrical engineer also working on a proto-telephone. Shulam speculates that the lawyer passed the information to Bell, who put Gray's contraption -- involving a platinum needle and dilute solution of sulphuric acid in a cup -- to the test in his Boston laboratory. The rest is history.

As if that wasn't difficult enough to accept, earlier this week a front-page New York Times story by music critic and scholar Jody Rosen (about whom I've written for Ideas before) argued that the first recording of the human voice wasn't made by Thomas Edison. Nearly two decades before Edison captured the spoken words "Mary had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, it turns out, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, captured a 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" on a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back.

The "phonautograph" recording was converted from squiggles on paper to sound by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., Rosen reported.

But you've already about this. The real reason I'm blogging about it is because you have to listen to Charlotte Green, a professionally bland BBC newsreader, totally crack up after listening to the barely audible "Au Clair de la Lune" recording. Listen to the entire sound clip; it gets better and better.