WASHINGTONThe muffled sounds from more than 150 years ago resemble the wa wa of the unseen teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. It would be impossible to know that someone was playing the coronet and guitar, although other fragments, from a dramatic speech from Shakespeares Othello, might be discerned if you knew the lines by heart in French.

Yet these sound bites and other snippets, unveiled May 29 by historians at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, are the earliest known recordings. A bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by the soot from an oil lamp date from 1857. Thats 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph.

Source