Alexander Graham Bell recordings played from 1880s

[entropy13]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Alexander Graham Bell foresaw many things, including that people could someday talk over a telephone. Yet the inventor certainly never could have anticipated that his audio-recording experiments in a Washington, D.C., lab could be recovered 130 years later and played for a gathering of scientists, curators and journalists.

"To be or not to be..." a man's voice can be heard saying in one recording as it was played on a computer at the Library of Congress on Tuesday. The speaker from the 1880s recites a portion of Hamlet's Soliloquy as a green wax disc crackles to life from computer speakers.

The early audio recordings — which revealed recitations of Shakespeare, numbers and other familiar lines — had been packed away and deemed obsolete at the Smithsonian Institution for more than a century. But new technology has allowed them to be recovered and played.

The technology reads the sound from tiny grooves with light and a 3D camera.

The recordings offer a glimpse into the dawn of the information age, when inventors were scrambling to make new discoveries and secure patents for the first telephones and phonographs, even early fiber optics.



Full article here.

[HossHuge]

Interesting read. I hoped we would be able to hear the recordings.

[Steevo]

You have to pay to download them, or pirate them.

[NinkobEi]

Is it really pirating if the recordings are 130 years old? Seems like there is a statute of limitation on copyrighted material ;D

[qubit]

I love stuff like this. Good find entropy.

[JATownes]

This is the part of the story that threw me for a loop:

The Library of Congress partnered with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley to offer the first listen of these early recordings on Tuesday. Scientists have spent the past 10 years and about $1 million to develop the technology to create high-resolution digital scans of the sound discs.
This year, scholars from the Library of Congress, the Berkeley Lab and the Smithsonian gathered in a new preservation lab at the Library of Congress and recovered sound from those early Bell recordings. A $600,000 three-year grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Sciences funded the pilot project, and the Smithsonian hopes to continue the work if future grants can be secured.

That sure is a lot of money to spend to be able to hear 130 year old recordings.

[Sasqui]

That is cool. I have an Edison Fireside phonograph... somewhere around 1906. Listening to sounds from 100+ years ago is ... spooky.



Edison tried to make the first phone answering machine with an attachment that would cut wax cylinders and make recordings, but it just didn't work too well and he ditched it.