This post was submitted by McGowan Transcriptions, and first appeared on their blog. McGowan Transcriptions is an audio and video transcription service provider based in the UK.

For many thousands of years of human history, we had absolutely no way of recording voices and sound for posterity. In fact, we didn’t even start writing things down until 3200BC, when people in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) created the earliest writing system– the cuneiform script. We can only guess just how much of history has been lost to time!

For this reason, the progress that’s been made in audio recording in the past 160 years alone is truly astonishing; technology has advanced in leaps and bounds. Starting with the invention of the somewhat rudimentary phonautograph (which could record sound but not play it back), we’ve progressed to advanced digital recording in less than two centuries. With more storage and digital files, we can carry our entire music libraries around on our smartphones, and even record sound on the go as and when we please.

Audio recording has never been so accessible and it is truly mindblowing to think just how little of spoken human history has actually been recorded in the grander scheme of things. We at McGowan Transcriptions decided to take a look at this fascinating history of audio recording and have created the following infographic to show our findings and the different advances that have been made.