All Hail Charles Cros, who dreamt up phonography (1877)

[Steve E.]

Charles Cros (1842–1888) was a French, Absinthe-gargling, Rimbaud-roommating surrealist poet with great hair, who actually invented BOTH color photography and audio phonography. Surviving documents prove it.

But he was too lazy, dreamy, or just partying too hard to actually implement his ideas, and other slightly later people (De Hauron & Edison) independently reached the same conclusions, with working models.

He also proposed interplanetary communication (to Mars and Venus) using a sort of light-flashy paraboloid proto run-length encoding system, which sounds to me a little like TV or bitmaps; he reworked this idea into a very early sci-fi story.

A tragic but ultimately groovy cat.

http://soundofthehound.com/2011/03/26/gathering-sounds-out-of-the-air-charles-cros-dawdles-edison-dawdles-less/

http://www.laputanlogic.com/articles/2004/06/01-0001.html