Editing Phonograph (section)

=== Paleophone ===
[[Charles Cros]], a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the [[French Academy of Sciences]], a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish [[Scientific priority|priority of conception]] of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute.<ref name="RBNF">{{citation |url=http://www.cairn.info/zen.php?ID_ARTICLE=RBNF_033_0020 |title=L'impression du son |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150928231926/http://www.cairn.info/zen.php?ID_ARTICLE=RBNF_033_0020 |archive-date=2015-09-28 |work=Revue de la BNF |date=2009 |publisher=Bibliothèque nationale de France |isbn=9782717724301 |issue=33 |url-status=live}}</ref>

An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure.<ref>{{cite web | title = www.phonozoic.net | work = Transcription and translation of October 10, 1877 article on Cros "phonographe". | url = http://phonozoic.net/n0131.htm | url-status = live | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110724004724/http://phonozoic.net/n0131.htm | archive-date = July 24, 2011 }}</ref> The author of this article called the device a {{lang|fr|phonographe}}, but Cros himself favored the word {{lang|fr|paleophone}}, sometimes rendered in French as {{lang|fr|voix du passé}} ('voice of the past').<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Brehm |first=Brett |date=2017 |title=Paleophonic Futures: Charles Cros's Audiovisual Worlds |url=https://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2017.0004 |journal=Nineteenth-Century French Studies |volume=45 |issue=3–4 |pages=179–197 |doi=10.1353/ncf.2017.0004 |issn=1536-0172}}</ref>

Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the [[public domain]] free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception.<ref>{{cite web | title = www.phonozoic.net | work = Transcription and translation of December 3, 1877 unsealing of April, 1877 Cros deposit. | url = http://WWW.phonozoic.net/n0130.htm | url-status = live | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110724005535/http://www.phonozoic.net/n0130.htm | archive-date = July 24, 2011 }}</ref>

Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Cros|title=Charles Cro: French inventor and poet|work=[[Encyclopedia Britannica]]|access-date=2018-03-09|language=en|archive-date=2018-03-09|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180309183518/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Cros|url-status=live}}</ref>