Au Clair de la Lune

“Au Clair de la Lune” is a French folk song from the 1700s, so old that nobody knows who actually wrote it. In the lyrics, the singer asks their friend Pierrot — a sad-faced clown character from French theater — to lend them a pen, since their own candle has burned out. The tune has an even bigger claim to fame: in 1860, a French inventor used it to make the oldest known recording of a human voice, nearly two decades before Edison's phonograph. Nobody could actually hear it, though, until 2008, when scientists finally figured out how to turn those old soot-tracings back into sound.