The discovery of a sound recording made in Paris in 1860 has established that Edison was not the first to record sound. The BBC reports that:

The short song was captured on April 9, 1860 by a phonautograph, a device created by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.

The device etched representations of sound waves into paper covered in soot from a burning oil lamp.

Lines were scratched into the soot by a needle moved by a diaphragm that responded to sound.

However, as the BBC report says, these sounds were never meant to be replayed. Edouard-Leon Scott, perhaps owing to his being a printer by profession, seemed to be more interested in recording the human voice in a “printable” fashion, or in transforming the human voice into a visual form. Recently, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California “read” very high-resolution digital scans of the original paper and reproduced the recorded sound. It is fascinating to hear an ethereal female voice from 150 years ago render a French folksong.

Scott died impoverished and frustrated that his invention was never recognized. As an interview with his great-grandson shows, it was a bitter irony for Scott that he had to be an assistant when Edison’s invention was demonstrated in Paris, and his own name was not even mentioned.

What went wrong with Scott’s phonautograph that we had not heard of it till now? Is it that it was a “partial” innovation–by this, I mean that it could only record but not reproduce sounds–while Edison’s could do both? One can argue that in a society that was print-oriented, a device that converted human voice into paper records might have been easy to accept. So, why didn’t Scott succeed? The answer to me lies in this: Scott lacked Communicative iSmarts. For instance, he could not persuade the Academy of Science of the value of his innovation. After the Academy expressed to him that it was not interested in audio-related invention given their focus on optics, I do not see much evidence that Scott tried to “market” his invention in other ways, or to other audiences. For example, there is not much evidence to argue that he tried to reach the general public with his “phonautograph.” In short, he did not demonstrate the flexibility in communication that is critical for innovation to succeed, a flexibility that Communicative iSmarts provides.

The phonautograph is but one example of a constant stream that we find of innovations that do not succeed, not because they are not good, but simply because the inventor(s) do not have or use communicative iSmarts. I find it heart-rending to picture this brilliant man, who had to stand before audiences in Paris demonstrating a machine from the USA, when he–and perhaps only he–knew fully well that twenty years ago, he had built something that recorded human voices. All because he lacked the critical intelligence of communicative iSmarts.