How far we’ve come in audio matters.

The NYT reports that the father of recorded sound wasn’t Thomas Edison, as previously believed. In 1860, seventeen years before Edison’s patent, a French typesetter created this recording, though he never heard it because the intended purpose of the phonautograph was to transfer sound to something decipherable in print.The inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, would surely be astounded that in just 148 years we’re now at the point where the songs of a prostitute servicing a politician can be disseminated to most global citizens in developed countries in just seconds. He also might wonder for a split second if Ashley Alexandra Dupre is French.