who is credited with discovering how to transmit sound without the use of wires
Wireless telegraphy US inventors William Henry Ward (1871) and Mahlon Loomis (1872) developed an electrical conduction systems based on the erroneous belief that there was an electrified atmospheric stratum accessible at low altitude.[7][8] They thought atmosphere current, connected with a return path using "Earth currents"' would allow for wireless telegraphy as well as supply power for the telegraph, doing away with artificial batteries.[9][10] A more practical demonstration of wireless transmission via conduction came in Amos Dolbear's 1879 magneto electric telephone that used ground conduction to transmit over a distance of a quarter of a mile.[11]
Sound recording and reproduction The first device that could record actual sounds as they passed through the air (but could not play them back—the purpose was only visual study) was the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The earliest known recordings of the human voice are phonautograph recordings, called "phonautograms", made in 1857.[6] They consist of sheets of paper with sound-wave-modulated white lines created by a vibrating stylus that cut through a coating of soot as the paper was passed under it. An 1860 phonautogram of Au Clair de la Lune, a French folk song, was played back as sound for the first time in 2008 by scanning it and using software to convert the undulating line, which graphically encoded the sound, into a corresponding digital audio file.[6][7]