The achievements of the inventor Joshua Steele (1700-1791) are twofold. First, he used musical concepts to analyze what modern linguists call "suprasegmentals"-voice-pitch, length, and stress; then, he used musical notation as the basis of a new system for recording and executing speech. Just as scholars of music now rely on musical notation for transcribing music heard during fieldwork, so Steele relied on his new system for recording declamations heard during theatrical productions.The aim of phonologists has been to provide a set of properties that can describe all the sounds used in human language. There are two main categories of such sounds: segmentals-phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences; and suprasegmentals-voice-pitch, length, and stress. In this article, I shall be concerned only with the latter, which traditionally were treated as part of prosody. To describe such sounds, it is necessary to convert them into visible patterns for study and analysis. Such a conversion was made possible by the invention of instruments for recording acoustic stimuli, but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that such recording devices began to be realized. One such device, built about 1857, was the phonautograph, which transferred waveforms to paper. 2 Numerous other mechanical devices followed, including phonophotography; 3 but these were finally consigned to oblivion by the cathode-ray tube, which, in 1947, made possible the invention of the spectrogram, a device that exhibits the energy present at each frequency in the sound wave produced 1 I am grateful to David Tunley for his helpful comments on an early draft.

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