Léon Scott de Martinville

Léon Scott de Martinville was a French inventor born in 1817, best known for creating the earliest known device to record sound. In 1860, he developed the phonautograph, which could capture sound waves as visual tracings on paper but could not play the sounds back. His work predated Thomas Edison’s phonograph by about 20 years. Although Scott’s device was not designed for playback, it represented a significant step in audio recording technology, laying the groundwork for future inventions that ultimately led to modern sound recording and playback systems.