Birth of a New Medium The phonograph was born out of mankind’s inherent desire to record sensory information. This desire could not be realized until the Industrial Revolution, when Western science accelerated sufficiently to allow the creation of such a precise instrument. A number of different tools and instruments for gauging and analyzing data and chemical composites were produced and a powerful new shift in the evolution of sound was about to begin. Allen Koenigsberg notes that Thomas Young as early as 1806 experimented with sound recording searching for a more precise description of sound waves than human script. By 1857 Leon Scott had perfected his 'phonautograph' for recording the sounds of the human voice. The models Scott produced were used to study sound waves in the emerging fields of telegraphy and telephony. Despite Scott's success no one proposed a device to play the sound back for review, as Koenigsberg puts it, 'no one contemplated going into the record business, and the word phonograph referred only to a system of stenography invented by Isaac Pitman years before'. The recordings of sound from devices like Scott's are shadows, they are a collection of negatives yet to be developed. It took humankind 71 years collectively to realise that sound could and should be played back as well as recorded! Growing up in a world with recorded sound its difficult to imagine the cognitive leap that was necessary to conceive of replaying an event that couldn't be directly witnessed with the eyes. A feasible modern technique of playing sound waves back for examination by the ears was described in 1877, when a French scientist and poet, Charles Cros, deposited an envelope at the Academy of Sciences in Paris containing a theory for reviewing sound aurally as well as optically. Sadly, Cros’ device, the Paleophone, was never more than a theory and Cros himself died bizarrely from absinthe abuse in 1888. That’s Rock and Roll for ya.