Sound!

Hey Guys, it's Adventure Van, with a blog about Sound. Sound is the thing that allows us to hear shouting, whispering, music, noises, and other things. However, sound has always been around. We have evidence of early cavemen using caves to amplify there voices. So why is sound important? Because humans have invented ways of recording music, sending voices over radio, and eventually designing the phone that we use everyday. From business to necessity, this how the Sounds we know today came to be.

Sound started being really experimented in by human standards in opera houses, where we designed them so people could hear speech everywhere. These innovations eventually spread to creating the first ever recorder, made by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville. The 'phonautograph', as he named it, recorded the first ever voice, and therfore made him the first man to have his voice live forever, So why isn't he in the history books with Alexander Graham Bell? Because he forgot about one thing: playback. The machine was only very recently deciphered, and it's gravely and almost impossible to understand. But, it's the first time in history that man has made himself effectively immortal and timeless.

With other inventors adding on to this, we began recording music and being able to play it at a moments notice. We also began to replace letters with scrolls of scribbles on wax, so that they could be read out loud as they were said. However, this never caught on, unfortunately, as the devices needed to make these were expensive, uncommon, and broke down often. But this gave the idea of transporting sound to other people, and from this idea is where Alexander Graham Bell got his famous first simultaneous discussion over distance. This itself was a huge development in history, as now you didn't have to be near others, and buildings that were skyscraper proportions could host entire groups of people working simultaneously. However, the cabling was expensive and bulky, and it wasn't able to connect across cities, counties, countries, and others.

However, we eventually managed to discover a new way of communication, thanks to Lee De Forest, who discovered radio waves. He disovered these now common waves by chance: he played with electromagnetic pulses  and discovered that something invisible was changing the intensity of his gas lamp. The 'wireless telegraph' had already been invented, but you'd have to be in the same 1 mile, which wasn't a long distance caller. But, after finding out that radio waves and gas were connected, De Forest went on to create a way to get the gas to expand the signal of the radio waves. He tested this amazing system by setting up a microphone system in a opera house, and playing it to him from the other side of town. Amazingly, the grainy noise was the music, and he could eventually get a two way radio system.

While at first this was used mainly for hobbyists, construction workers, and police officers to talk while working, some bright person saw that combining the powers of records and this radio meant that music could be played anywhere with a radio, not needing a record or music source. Because any song could be played, this meant that Jazz was introduced to people who never had picked up a record of it before, creating the 'Jazz Age'. This also helped the black political movement, as songs such as 'Strange Fruit' were played to the ears of many people.

Sound has been around for a while, but this sudden attempt at recording and sharing it is only recent. But we've done it.

Adventure Van, hearing this.