Thomas Edison is often credited with being the first person to record sound.
But it was in fact a Frenchman named Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville who invented sound recording via his phonautograph in 1857 – 20 years before Edison invented his phonograph.
When this was recorded, there was no known way of how to yet play back anything. It was more an experiment to try to replicate how the human ear works. With today’s technology, though, we can reverse engineer that to reproduce the sound.
This is a 164-year-old recording, many generations ago. Technology itself was still in the era of steam power. Radio, phonographs, gramophones, etc were still a long way away from being invented.