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Alexander
Graham Bell worked with sound, tinkering with gadgets to help his wife,
who was deaf, communicate. He is known as the inventor of the
telephone. He gave the Smithsonian more than 400 discs and cylinders of
his audio experiments, but until recently there was no way to play them
back.
As a result, says curator Carlene Stephens of
the National Museum of American History, the discs, ranging from 4 to 14
inches in diameter, remained “mute artifacts.” She began to wonder, she
adds, “if we would ever know what was on them.”
Then, Stephens
learned that physicist Carl Haber at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in Berkeley, California, had succeeded in extracting sound
from early recordings made in Paris in 1860. He and his team created
high-resolution optical scans converted by computer into an audio file.
Stephens
contacted Haber. Early in 2011, Haber, his colleague physicist Earl
Cornell and Peter Alyea, a digital conversion specialist at the Library
of Congress, began analyzing the Volta Lab discs, unlocking sound
inaccessible for more than a century. Muffled voices could be detected
reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy, sequences of numbers and “Mary Had a Little
Lamb.”
In autumn 2011, Patrick Feaster, an Indiana University
sound-media historian, aided by Stephens, compiled an exhaustive
inventory of notations on the discs and cylinders—many scratched on wax
and all but illegible. Their scholarly detective work led to a
tantalizing discovery. Documents indicated that one wax-and-cardboard
disc, from April 15, 1885—a date now deciphered from a wax
inscription—contained a recording of Bell speaking.
You can hear that recording and read more about it at
Smithsonian.
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