The following passage is adapted from an article on the history of acoustic technology.
[Paragraph 1] (lines 1–10)
In 1857, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph, a device designed to transcribe sound waves into visual patterns. Unlike later technologies, Scott’s apparatus was never intended to play back the sound it recorded. Instead, it was conceived as an analog to the camera, capturing the ephemeral nature of human speech and music onto paper or glass coated with lampblack. Scott, a printer by trade, believed that just as photography allowed people to read the visual world, his invention would allow them to read the literal shapes of sound waves, treating acoustic vibrations as a new form of stenography.
[Paragraph 2] (lines 11–20)
The physical design of the phonautograph mirrored the anatomy of the human ear, reflecting the nineteenth-century fascination with physiological systems. It utilized a funnel-shaped horn to collect sound waves, directing them toward a flexible membrane that acted like an eardrum. Attached to this membrane was a delicate stylus made of a hog's bristle. As sound waves vibrated the membrane, the stylus traced corresponding undulating lines onto a hand-cranked cylinder wrapped in soot-blackened paper. By physically mirroring biological hearing, Scott succeeded in creating the first automated graphical representations of acoustic frequency and amplitude.
[Paragraph 3] (lines 21–31)
For over a century, the phonautograph was regarded as a historical curiosity—a precursor to Thomas Edison’s phonograph that failed to achieve the ultimate goal of acoustic reproduction. However, in 2008, American historians and audio specialists bypassed this limitation by using high-resolution digital scans to read Scott’s surviving recordings. By converting the visual squiggles back into digital audio files, they successfully recovered the sound of a human voice singing a French folk song from 1860. This modern breakthrough transformed the historical assessment of Scott’s work, proving that he had recorded sound decades before Edison, even if he lacked the technology to hear it.
Based on the passage, match each paragraph to the statement that best describes its main idea.
- Paragraph 1 (lines 1–10)A description of the phonautograph's initial conceptual purpose as a visual recording medium.
- Paragraph 2 (lines 11–20)An explanation of the device's mechanical design and its replication of biological processes.
- Paragraph 3 (lines 21–31)An account of how modern technology reevaluated the historical significance of the invention.