It's scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world's first recorded blooper.
The
modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable
recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a
musical performance, thanks to digital advances that allowed the sound
to be transferred from flimsy tinfoil to computer.
The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.
At
a time when music lovers can carry thousands of digital songs on a
player the size of a pack of gum, Edison's tinfoil playback seems
prehistoric. But that dinosaur opens a key window into the development
of recorded sound.
"In the history of recorded sound that's still
playable, this is about as far back as we can go," said John Schneiter, a
trustee at the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, where
it was played Thursday night in the city where Edison helped found the
General Electric Co.
The recording opens with a 23-second cornet
solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man's voice reciting "Mary
Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard." The man laughs at two spots
during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong
words in the second nursery rhyme.
"Look at me; I don't know the song," he says.
When
the recording was played using modern technology during a presentation
Thursday at a nearby theater, it was likely the first time it had been
played at a public event since it was created during an Edison
phonograph demonstration held June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, museum
officials said.
The recording was made on a sheet of tinfoil, 5
inches wide by 15 inches long, placed on the cylinder of the phonograph
Edison invented in 1877 and began selling the following year.
A
hand crank turned the cylinder under a stylus that would move up and
down over the foil, recording the sound waves created by the operator's
voice. The stylus would eventually tear the foil after just a few
playbacks, and the person demonstrating the technology would typically
tear up the tinfoil and hand the pieces out as souvenirs, according to
museum curator Chris Hunter.
Popping noises heard on this recording are likely from scars left from where the foil was folded up for more than a century.
"Realistically, once you played it a couple of times, the stylus would tear through it and destroy it," he said.
Only
a handful of the tinfoil recording sheets are known to known to
survive, and of those, only two are playable: the Schenectady museum's
and an 1880 recording owned by The Henry Ford museum in Michigan.
Hunter
said he was able to determine just this week that the man's voice on
the museum's 1878 tinfoil recording is believed to be that of Thomas
Mason, a St. Louis newspaper political writer who also went by the pen
name I.X. Peck.
Edison company records show that one of his newly
invented tinfoil phonographs, serial No. 8, was sold to Mason for $95.50
in April 1878, and a search of old newspapers revealed a listing for a
public phonograph program being offered by Peck on June 22, 1878, in St.
Louis, the curator said.
A woman's voice says the words "Old
Mother Hubbard," but her identity remains a mystery, he said. Three
weeks after making the recording, Mason died of sunstroke, Hunter said.
A
Connecticut woman donated the tinfoil to the Schenectady museum in 1978
for an exhibit on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Edison
company that later merged with another to form GE. The woman's father
had been an antiques dealer in the Midwest and counted the item among
his favorites, Hunter said.
In July, Hunter brought the Edison
tinfoil recording to California's Berkeley Lab, where researchers such
as Carl Haber have had success in recent years restoring some of the
earliest audio recordings.
Haber's projects include recovering a
snippet of a folk song recorded a capella in 1860 on paper by
Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, a French printer credited with
inventing the earliest known sound recording device.
Haber and his
team used optical scanning technology to replicate the action of the
phonograph's stylus, reading the grooves in the foil and creating a 3D
image, which was then analyzed by a computer program that recovered the
original recorded sound.
The achievement restores a vital link in
the evolution of recorded sound, Haber said. The artifact represents
Edison's first step in his efforts to record sound and have the
capability to play it back, even if it was just once or twice, he said.
"It really completes a technology story," Haber said. "He was on the right track from the get-go to record and play it back."
Legal
humorist Kevin Underhill imagined a horrifying world in which the
greatest works of Western literature were composed by attorneys. At the
link, you can read selections from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Hearing Before the U.S. Patent Examiner and Herman Melville's Moby
Dick, or, The "Whale" (A Narrative About, But Not Necessarily Limited
to, the Species Enumerated at 50 C.F.R. sec. 224.101(b)(xiv).
Before
the use of ether revolutionized surgery in 1846, Dr. Robert Liston was
the premiere surgeon at his teaching hospital in London. In those days,
surgery was a last resort, patients had to be restrained, and speed was
essential. Liston was very good at what he did.
