A new old recording

Forget Mary and her lamb. Thomas Edison’s clip of the rhyme used to be considered the oldest known recorded human voice. But there is something older — 17 years older to be exact.

It’s a 10-second clip of someone singing “Au Clair de la Lune,” The Associated Press reports. The recording was taken from a so-called phonautogram, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.

Like what you heard? Catch some old speeches by men such as William Jennings Bryan.

And Tinfoil.com — a site devoted to the preservation of early recorded sounds — posts a new old recording every month.