The machine used a horn to collect sound, vibrating a stiff bristle which scratched the waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp.
Scott de Martinville’s invention was useful for the scientific investigation of sound waves but could not play back its recordings - unlike Edison’s 1877 phonograph.
Now its earliest surviving recording has been unlocked.
An item about the discovery left Radio 4 newsreader Charlotte Green in fits of giggles today after a colleague apparently whispered in her ear that the recording sounded more like a bee buzzing in a bottle.
But it is music indeed to the man who rescued it from oblivion.
Mr Giovannoni, a member of First Sounds, a group dedicated to preserving humankind’s earliest sound recordings, said: “It’s like discovering the world’s oldest photograph and learning that the photograph was taken 17 years before the invention of the camera.”
He learned about its existence in an archive in Paris on March 1. He travelled to the French capital a week later.
Experts from First Sounds made high-resolution digital scans of the paper, which were then converted into sound using specialist technology by scientists at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“It’s important on so many levels,” Mr Giovannoni said.
“Thomas Edison is generally credited as the first person to have recorded sound. But actually the truth is he was the first person to have recorded and played it back.”
Scott de Martinville came from a slightly earlier phase of attempts to record sound, he said.
“There were several people working along the lines of Scott, including Alexander Graham Bell, in experimenting - trying to write the visual representation of sound before Edison invented the idea of playing it back.
“What Scott was trying to do was to write down some sort of image of the sound so that he could study it visually. That was his only intent.”
The recording will be presented on Friday at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California.
• The recording of Clair de la Lune can be heard online at www.firstsounds.org/press/032708/index.php
