Alexander Graham Bell recordings played from 1880s

[Broondog]

i found this article quite interesting. playing back 130yr old recordings would be awesome!


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.


more at link

http://news.yahoo.com/alexander-graham-bell-recordings-played-1880s-210138693.html

[Sergis Bauer]

Fascinating. There are even earlier sound "recordings" than those... Edouard-Leon Scott had a machine called a phonautograph in the 1860's, that did not yet record reproducable sounds, but graphically recorded the soundwaves on paper. With modern computer technology-- probably not much different from what was used for these early Bell recordings-- engineers were able to turn these drawings back into audible sounds. The results are pretty awful, but just being able to hear recordings of ANY sounds from 1860 is pretty cool:

www.firstsounds.org

[Helen Keller]

whats crazy is... it cost them $1 million dollars to catch up with him.