Researchers find a French recording made in 1860 of a piece of the song “Au Clair de la Lune”. It was made utlizing a machine called a phonautograph, which scribbles audio waves onto a paper covered with soot, a phonautogram. The man that made the phonautograph, and recorded the song fragment, was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.  This discovery pre-dates the previous recording thought to be the first, which was by Thomas Edison 28 years later.

The phoneautograph and its maker had no way of playing back the sounds at the time. But the American researchers that found the recordings converted them to a digital audio recording.