Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently played a scratchy recording of a cat - it sounded like, "rrrrraa...rrrrllll...rrllll...rllllnnnnee", and called it the first recording.The researchers claimed it to be a digitized version of a phonautograph, invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1860, which the historian in you will recall is almost 30 years before Edison made a wax recording of a tenor, which some folks have had the audacity to call the birth of the blues but others call the foundation of the mpeg.
But fear not Edisonites! Careful listening of the phonoautograph will reveal it to the caterwauls of a pussy, albeit it a French one, thus all the rage today by researchers and pussy afficinados everywhere.