Recording Sound on Paper

In 1857 — nearly two decades before Edison’s phonograph — Parisian printer and bookseller Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented a device he called the phonautograph. Scott de Martinville was a self-taught inventor who was fascinated by how the human ear and voice worked together. In the era of early photography, he wondered: What did sound look like?

The phonautograph was his answer. The machine consisted of a large horn that collected sound, a stretched membrane that vibrated with the air pressure, and a bristle or stylus attached to that membrane. When someone spoke or sang into the horn, the stylus etched those vibrations onto a sheet of paper or glass coated in soot from a lamp flame, preserving the pattern of the sound waves.

Scott de Martinville’s goal wasn’t to reproduce sound, because he had no means to play the recordings back. Instead, he wanted to make sound visible, by creating what he described as a visual record of the voice itself. 

He imagined scientists studying the visual signatures of speech, singers analyzing their tones, and future generations reading the voices of the past like musical manuscripts. In his writings, he questioned whether one might “preserve for future generations some features of the diction of those eminent actors… who die without leaving behind the faintest trace of their genius?”

The First Voice Recording

In April 1860, Scott de Martinville used his phonautograph to capture a voice singing the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.” The following year, he submitted the resulting soot-covered tracing to the Académie des Sciences in Paris for preservation.

At the time, no one could hear it. The lines were a pattern of vibration, so their meaning was visible but inaudible. It wasn’t until 2008 that the phonautogram could finally be played. A team of audio historians from the First Sounds project and scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used high-resolution optical scanning of the soot-marked paper to convert the waveforms into audible sound. By scanning the lines in high resolution, they were able to translate the visual waveforms into digital audio.

What emerged was the faint but unmistakable sound of a human voice singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” The 20-second audio was marred by distortion and irregular tempo, so researchers at first thought the singer was a woman or a child. But further analysis revealed that it was likely Scott de Martinville himself singing.  

Because Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph produced the first known physical record of sound vibrations, which has since been converted into audible sound, it is recognized today as the earliest recording of the human voice ever made. The 2008 breakthrough effectively rewrote the first chapter of sound-recording history.

Scott de Martinville died in 1879, unaware that his sound tracings would one day be heard. Yet through the efforts of modern historians and engineers, his silent tracings finally became what he had imagined — a way to preserve sound for future generations.

Two decades after the phonautograph, another French inventor, Charles Cros, theorized a way to reproduce recorded sound. In April 1877 — months before Edison’s phonograph — he deposited a sealed letter with the Académie des Sciences describing his paleophone, a device that could both record and replay sound. Cros never built his invention, but his idea of capturing and reproducing the human voice became a reality with Edison’s phonograph in 1877.

Test Cards Have Been Around Almost as Long as TV

Test cards date back to the 1930s, when the BBC used printed cards placed in front of cameras to help engineers align signals. The BBC’s first test card, used in 1934, was a simple black circle with a line underneath it. The practice caught on in the U.S. in the 1940s as commercial broadcasting expanded. These early test cards were often mounted on easels in front of studio cameras during off-air hours.

Black-and-white patterns featured radial grids, concentric circles, and crosshairs to reveal image distortion, framing errors, or technical noise. With the arrival of color broadcasting in the 1960s and ’70s, test patterns evolved into electronically generated images such as the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) color bars to test for hue, saturation, contrast, and brightness. Today, the calibration and troubleshooting of broadcast signals are handled by specialized test-signal generators, though they are not broadcast to viewers.

Test Cards Became Cultural Touchstones

Some test cards became more than just technical tools — they evolved into pop culture artifacts. In the U.S., the RCA “Indian head” test pattern — featuring a Native American figure flanked by geometric markings — was created in 1939 and ran for more than two decades, becoming a kind of visual shorthand for early American television. CBS had its own “bullseye” test pattern, a striking design with concentric circles and resolution wedges used to check focus and sharpness.

Depending on where you grew up, you might remember a specific local station’s test card — one that not only included the TV channel number and the affiliate’s call sign but also the location it was broadcasting from. For instance, ABC affiliate WJZ-TV in New York featured the Empire State Building on its black-and-white test card in the early 1950s, giving the broadcast a distinctly regional identity. These static images became a familiar part of daily television viewing, connecting viewers to their local stations and communities.

Across the Atlantic, the BBC’s Test Card F became one of the most iconic test patterns of all. Introduced in 1967, it featured a young girl named Carole Hersee (daughter of BBC engineer George Hersee) playing tic-tac-toe with a slightly unsettling clown doll named Bubbles. Airing for thousands of hours between 1967 and 1998, Hersee’s face became the most-broadcast image in U.K. television history.

A Nostalgic Link to Early TV

For viewers of a certain age, test cards were an unofficial signal that the day was over. When the test pattern appeared, you knew it was time to turn off the TV and go to bed.

In the 1980s and ’90s, however, 24-hour programming took over. Infomercials, syndicated reruns, and late-night variety shows replaced those once-quiet hours. Cable, satellite, and eventually streaming made content seemingly infinite and calibration test patterns largely obsolete. Today, if a station goes off the air (usually due to weather or technical issues), you’re more likely to see a local station logo or a digital error message than a test pattern.

Even though test cards have mostly vanished from live broadcasts, they still crop up in pop culture as a kind of retro shorthand — an inside joke for those who know what they represent. On The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper’s SMPTE color bars T-shirt turned vintage broadcast tech into a fashion trend; the image has been widely reproduced and sold on everything from clothing to coffee mugs. 

Some of us who remember when test cards signaled the end of the TV viewing day still have a strange fondness for their eerie stillness. In a world of endless choices and the seemingly judgmental “Are you still watching?” prompt, test cards remind us of a time when television showed us everything it had to offer — and then signed off for the night.

The Underwater Exploits of Cornelis Drebbel

While it’s entirely possible that Alexander the Great used divers at Tyre, and possibly a rudimentary diving bell, it’s hard to give him credit for the first true submarine journey. That honor is more correctly bestowed on Cornelis Drebbel, a Dutch inventor who was invited to the court of King James I of England in 1604. 

Drebbel had already made a name for himself as an engineer and inventor, having created various contraptions in Holland, including perpetual motion machines, clocks, and a self-regulating furnace. But it was during his time in England that Drebbel came up with arguably his most famous invention. In 1620, while working for the Royal Navy, Drebbel designed and built the first documented navigable submarine. None of his original records or engineering drawings survive, but there were enough eyewitness accounts to give us a good idea of how his submarine worked. 

The basic design was like a rowing boat, but with raised and meeting sides, and the whole vessel covered in greased leather. It had a watertight hatch in the middle and was propelled by oars that came out the side through watertight leather seals. Large pigskin bladders were used to control diving and surfacing, while tubes floated at the surface of the water likely provided the crew with oxygen. 

Drebbel built three submarines in total, each one bigger than the last — the final model had six oars and could carry 16 passengers. He tested them on the River Thames in London in front of thousands of spectators, one of whom was King James I. Contemporary accounts suggest that the king himself may have joined Drebbel on one of his test runs, making James I the first monarch to ride in a submarine. Accounts of the test runs, which continued until 1624, state that the submarine could travel underwater from Westminster to Greenwich and back — a three-hour trip with the boat traveling 15 feet below the surface.

The Revolutionary War’s Turtle

Another hugely significant submarine journey took place a little more than a century and a half after Drebbel’s historic underwater excursions. In 1776, a one-man submersible called the Turtle became the world’s first combat submarine during the American Revolutionary War. 

Designed by American inventor David Bushnell, this remarkable vessel was shaped somewhat like a large acorn, or, as Bushnell described it in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, as “two upper tortoise shells of equal size, joined together.” The submarine was propelled vertically and horizontally by hand-cranked and pedal-powered propellers operated by the single pilot. 

On September 7, 1776, Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Continental Army piloted the Turtle in the first ever combat mission involving a submarine. He used the vessel in an attempted attack on the British flagship HMS Eagle in New York Harbor. The Turtle was equipped with a mine that was to be attached to the hull of the enemy ship, but Lee failed to attach the explosive charge to the hull. The perilous mission was a failure, as were subsequent missions involving the sub. It was, nevertheless, a pivotal moment in the history of warfare, with the Turtle demonstrating the potential of submarines in combat. 

 It Was Aesthetically Appealing as Well as Practical

While sepia toning was primarily adopted for its preservation benefits, its aesthetic qualities also contributed to its widespread appeal. The warm, brownish hues of sepia prints conveyed a sense of elegance and timelessness. Unlike the stark contrast of black-and-white images, sepia tones were considered more flattering, making them particularly popular for portraits and sentimental keepsakes. The process deepened contrast, refined tonal gradation, and offered a softer, dreamlike image compared to black-and-white photography.

Culturally, sepia-toned photographs came to define the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras, a period marked by industrial progress and significant social and cultural changes in both Europe and the United States. Photography during this time captured moments from everyday life, such as family portraits, weddings, christenings, and postmortem photos of deceased loved ones, as well as architecture, nature scenes, and historical events. As a result, sepia-toned photography became linked to collective memories of the past, reinforcing its association with history and nostalgia.

Sepia Toning Eventually Fell Out of Favor 

The dominance of sepia-toned photographs began to fade in the early 20th century as advancements in technology introduced more efficient and affordable ways to preserve images. Black-and-white photography became the standard because it was simpler, faster, and less costly than the additional chemical treatment required for sepia toning. By the 1920s and ’30s, photographers increasingly preferred gelatin silver prints, which produced high-quality black-and-white images without the need for sepia toning.

The decline of sepia toning continued with the rise of color photography in the mid-20th century. As color film became more widely available and affordable in the 1940s and ’50s, both sepia and black-and-white photography fell out of fashion. Sepia tones remained relevant in some artistic and archival contexts, but today that nostalgic aesthetic is often recreated digitally rather than through chemical processing.

Why QWERTY?

Here’s where things get a little foggy. An often-repeated explanation for the QWERTY keyboard layout is that it was designed by Sholes to slow typists down in order to prevent typewriters from jamming. If you’ve ever used an old-fashioned typewriter, you might have noticed how easy it is to strike letters in quick succession, or simultaneously, which can cause the type bars to become stuck together. 

But would Sholes really have sabotaged his own keyboard layout to hamper the speed of operators? In reality, there is little to no hard evidence of any deliberate slowdown. And the patent that first mentions the QWERTY layout contains no direct mention of why the keys were placed in such a manner. If it was indeed designed to cause fewer jams, this feature would likely have been a primary attribute of the patent. What’s more, at the time that Sholes patented the QWERTY layout, there were no “touch typists,” so no one was typing particularly quickly, let alone speed-typing. 

So, why did QWERTY become standard? One convincing and particularly thorough answer comes from Kyoto University researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka. In their 2010 paper “On the Prehistory of QWERTY,” the researchers conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Instead, the QWERTY system was a rather circuitous result of how the first typewriters were being used. 

Among the most prominent early adopters of early typewriters were telegraph operators, whose priority was to quickly transcribe messages. These operators found an alphabetical keyboard arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. The Kyoto paper suggests the QWERTY keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of the input provided by these telegraph operators. According to the researchers, “The keyboard arrangement was incidentally changed into QWERTY, first to receive telegraphs, then to thrash out a compromise between inventors and producers, and at last to evade old patents.”

In other words, QWERTY came about through a combination of factors. There was direct input from telegraph operators, as well as compromises made between inventors and producers — practical changes made by the manufacturers who actually had to mass produce the product. (The keyboard layout on Scholes’ original prototype, for example, was altered by the mechanics at Remington.) And then there were old patents to contend with. In 1886, a new company called Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict (WS&B) released the Remington Standard Type-Writer No. 2. To avoid existing keyboard layout patents, the company slightly altered the design, placing M next to N and swapping around C and X. This became the QWERTY format keyboard we use today.

The Persistence of an Imperfect Design

While the precise intentions behind Sholes’ QWERTY design are at least partially lost to history, there is undoubtedly a strong argument against the popular belief that it was designed to slow typists down. 

What we know for sure is that the QWERTY layout is remarkable for its staying power. Despite the development of potentially more efficient keyboard layouts — most prominently the Dvorak layout, designed in the 1930s, which is supposed to be faster and more comfortable — QWERTY has remained the global standard. By the time alternative layouts were proposed, millions of people had already learned to type on QWERTY keyboards, and switching would have required massive retraining efforts for typists, not to mention a lot of grumbling from the general public. 

So, for now at least, QWERTY is very much here to stay — at least on laptops and PCs. Researchers at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have developed a split-screen keyboard they claim can increase typing speeds for touchscreen users who type with their thumbs. Known as KALQ (the letters at the bottom right of that keyboard), its layout is a radical departure from the QWERTY system, which has been unchanged for about a century and a half. Will KALQ gain a foothold? Only time, and more typing, will tell. 

Green Gemstones

The ancient Romans seemed to believe that emeralds and other green gemstones could be used as a means for soothing the eyes and possibly providing visual aid. One famous example appears in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, where the author notes how Emperor Nero watched a gladiatorial event with the assistance of a smaragdus — an emerald or similar gem. However, historians largely believe that the stone may not have magnified the spectacle so much as it helped to block the glare of the sun.

Water Globes

In his first volume of Naturales Quaestiones (Natural Questions), the Roman philosopher Seneca described the magnifying effect of water in glass: “Letters, however small and dim, are comparatively large and distinct when seen through a glass globe filled with water.” His contemporary Pliny the Elder also noted the lenslike qualities that resulted from combining these elements, although his observation was related to the potential for flammability when focusing the sun's rays through a glass water vessel. While the result may have been satisfactory, Seneca's lack of follow-up thoughts suggest that this particular method of magnification likely wasn't widely used.

Mirrors

In the same sentence describing the magnification qualities of the water vessels, Seneca wrote, "I have already said there are mirrors which increase every object they reflect." Indeed, concave metal, glass, or crystal mirrors could be used to magnify smaller texts for those with vision problems. As noted by Ilardi in Renaissance Vision From Spectacles to Telescopes, French author Jean de Meun wrote of the efficacy of this tool in the late-13th-century poem “Le Roman de la Rose,” although there aren’t many other documented uses of mirrors for this purpose.

Reading Stones

A major development in the area of visual tools came with the invention of reading stones. Often credited to ninth-century Andalusian scholar Abbas ibn Firnas, the concept of curved glass surfaces being used to magnify print was discussed at length in Arab mathematician Ibn al-Haytham's 1021 Book of Optics, which later received a wider audience with its translation to Latin.

Typically made from quartz, rock crystal, and especially beryl, reading stones were fashioned in a plano-convex shape, with the flat side against the page of a book and the rounded top providing a clear view of the lettering below. Initially used to assist the elderly with faltering vision, the stones became popular among younger readers as well, especially as beryl was said to possess magic and healing powers.

One surviving example of such reading stones are the 11th- to 12th-century Visby lenses discovered in Gotland, Sweden, in 1999. Along with providing excellent magnification of tiny text, many of these quartz lenses are mounted in silver, suggesting a decorative purpose as well.

It's unknown if the Visby lenses were the work of a local professional or somehow made their way from Muslim regions where other reading stones first appeared. Regardless, the quality of the images generated by these artifacts, and the craftsmanship that went into their creation, underscores how people were hardly left grasping in the dark for assistance in the days before eyeglasses became commonplace.

Glassmaking Is Thousands of Years Old

Ancient glass was made from three primary ingredients: sand (silicon dioxide or silica), an alkali oxide (typically soda ash or natron), and lime. When combined and heated to 2,400-2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, the ingredients fused to form glass. 

The earliest evidence of glassmaking includes objects such as beads, pendants, and inlays that were cast in open molds, but glass may have initially occurred as an accidental byproduct in the workshops of Bronze Age metalworkers and ceramicists. While archaeologists have found glass artifacts produced by the Egyptians and Phoenicians dating back to the second millennium BCE, current theory suggests that the first human-made glass dates back even further, to Mesopotamian craftsmen during the third millennium BCE, some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.

The Birthplace of Glassmaking

Researchers have long debated the birthplace of glassmaking, in part because glass products, as well as the raw materials used for the glassmaking process, such as blocks of colored glass called ingots, were frequently exchanged along trade routes. But advances in archaeology and chemistry have helped researchers better pinpoint the origins of glassmaking to ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). 

Situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Mesopotamia was well suited for trading its glass materials and glassmaking knowledge. By the second millennium BCE, artisans had developed sophisticated techniques to shape glass and create vessels. One such method, called core forming, involved creating a hollow vessel by covering a mud core with glass and then removing the hardened mud. Core-formed objects have been found in Mesopotamia, as well as Egypt, where glassmaking also flourished. 

Glass trading between Egypt and Assyria was mentioned in the Amarna Letters, a set of cuneiform clay tablets dating to the 14th century BCE that were excavated in the ancient desert city of Amarna, in modern-day Egypt. Not surprisingly, chemical analysis of glass excavated in Amarna found the glass was of Mesopotamian origin. Similarly, the presence of cobalt glass beads in Scandinavian Bronze Age tombs has provided evidence of a complex trading system linking Mesopotamia and Egypt with the Nordic Bronze Age cultures. These findings highlight the extensive trade networks of the ancient world, and demonstrate the far-reaching influence of Mesopotamian glassmaking, even as other cultures began to adapt and develop their own glassmaking methods.

Another historical method of awakening also involves water, though not drinking it in large quantities. In the fourth century BCE, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato notably refined the timekeeping tool known as the "clepsydra" or "water thief” into a primitive alarm clock. Throughout the night, one basin of water would empty into another. When the water rose to the desired level, it was then siphoned into another container, emitting a whistling sound and ensuring neither Plato nor the students of his famed academy slept through his lectures. Another creative yet complicated hydraulic device was the “Water-Driven Spherical Birds’-Eye-View Map of the Heavens,” one of the first known mechanical clocks, created in 725 CE by Chinese mathematician and inventor Yi Xing. Water flowed through its system of wheels, hooks, pins, shafts, locks, and rods; the wheel did a full revolution every 24 hours, and different sounds occurred at specific times — a bell would chime every hour, and a drumlike beat would sound every 15 minutes. 

Clocks using weights or pendulums, including devices with built-in alarm functionality, became much more accurate throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, but they remained largely out of reach for most people. Then, during Britain’s Industrial Revolution, the shift from agriculture to factory work created a demand for reliable timekeeping for more people than ever. Urbanization meant fewer people waking to the rooster’s crow, so instead, they depended on factory whistles, or, for those who could afford it, on “knocker-uppers” to ensure they woke up on time. 

Knocker-uppers were people who carried sticks, poles, or peashooters to tap on windows and wake the sleeping workers who had hired them as personal alarms. The knocker-uppers themselves were often night owls, waking for the day at 4 p.m. and retiring to bed after getting the laborers off to work. Eventually, electric alarm clocks became readily accessible to most people, but even as the gadgets gained popularity throughout the 1930s and ’40s, knocker-uppers were still found in some pockets of industrial England all the way up to the 1970s.