‘From such and such an hour, on such and such a day, all is frustration,’ they said.

‘Remember we will deceive you if we can,’ they said.

‘Sounds like that,’ they said, hearing an owl in the garden, ‘give us great pleasure.’

Also they communicated with warm breaths coming up from the ground; once with a lightning strike; sometimes with whistling – making use of George’s mouth; and then with sweet smells as of incense or flowers – in a doorway, in a small room, once through the whole house, in a pocket, in the palm of a hand. Sometimes, they raised the smell of cat shit or burnt feathers – smells that have never written themselves –

To see sound – that was the first astonishment. Charles Cros thought to recreate it, ‘to repeat speech using the traces of its sounds’. To reverse the mechanism, to photograph and engrave the markings that a voice had made in lamp-blacked paper, to run the needle back over those markings – to hear lost voices, to have them speak again. At first, Cros called it the paléophone: the voice of the past.

Charles Cros, as he said himself, could, without irony, be called a genius.

His genius, said André Breton, made him fall into that play of light and shadow between multiple spheres. His fingers, said Breton, were like life-coloured butterflies. While they fed on flowers, they were drawn only to the light of the future.¹

Cros had invited Rimbaud to visit his laboratory. Rimbaud smashed the equipment.²

18 April 1877: Cros sent a sealed envelope to the Academie des Sciences, describing his invention: ‘Pli contenant la description d’un procéde d’enregistrement et reproduction des phénomènes percus par l’ouïe’. Cros spoke to a friend about building a prototype. He couldn’t raise the money. He had invented colour photography; he chose not to patent it. He had discovered a way to make rubies in a laboratory. Others took the profit.

Cros had first invented phonography in the short story Un drame interastral, set in 2872, a thousand years in the future. Its storyteller is among those who only admire ‘the normal and indisputable masterpieces of the twenty-fifth century’. There are limits to what the storyteller can say. He tells a cautionary tale of two lovers: one on earth, one on Venus. The planets’ astronomers are swapping pictures of flora, one for one, using a battery resembling a giant insect’s eye. Secretly the lovers, children of astronomers, send each other traces of themselves. First, successive photographs: for their bodies, rounded and in motion, to be projected on dust clouds or smoke in a darkened room – ‘untouchable images, made of light alone’. After that, the lovers send each other ‘the sound of their voice, their talk, their songs’ – recorded in wavering lines, reproduced by an electronic tuning fork.

At the story’s end, the state has seized all records of Glaux’s correspondence: his papers, photographies, photoscupltures, and phonographies –

The French authorities had used photographs to track down and arrest Communards.³

The playfulness of Cros’s work, said Breton, ‘should not obscure the fact that at the centre of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is levelled straight at us’.

A month or so after he left his sealed envelope with the Academie, Cros met his friend Abbot Leblanc, a science writer. In October, Leblanc published a description of his friend’s invention, calling it a phonographe. In December, Edison sketched a plan for an invention that he called the phonograph. His mechanic John Kruesi took thirty hours to build it. After Edison spoke into it, it spoke his words back to him –

Mary had a little lamb
little lamb little lamb
Mary had a little lamb
its fleece was white as snow

Edison took his invention to the newspapers.