Listening to the past, recorded on tin foil and glass, for the first time in over a century
February 10, 2012 2:35 PM Subscribe
Towards the end of the 1800s, there were three primary American groups competing to invent technology to record and play back audio.
Alexander Graham Bell worked with with Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell in at their
Volta Laboratory in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., while
Thomas A. Edison worked from his
Menlo Park facilities, and
Emile Berliner worked in
his independent laboratory in
his home. To secure the rights to their inventions, the three groups sent samples of their work to the Smithsonian. These recordings became part of the permanent collections, now consisting of 400 of the earliest audio recordings ever made.
But knowledge of their contents was limited to old, short descriptions, as the rubber, beeswax, glass, tin foil and brass recording media are fragile, and playback devices might damage the recordings, if such working devices are even available. That is, until
a collaborative project with the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory came together to make 2D and 3D optical scanners, capable of
visually recording the patterns marked on discs and cylinders, respectively.
Six discs from Bell's Volta Laboratory have been scanned, and made available on
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's page for the project, as well as
posted on YouTube, and high quality images have been
posted to Flickr (
Flash-based slideshow). The National Museum of American History blog has a two-part post on the audio recovery:
Trilled R's and the dawn of recorded sound in America, and
Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice.
IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), previously, in
2007 (Archive.org view of irene.lbl.gov), before work on these hundred-plus year old audio recordings were scanned. And Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory previously worked on audio recreation:
the 1860 phonautogram, first thought to be a female voice,
later determined to be the (male) inventor himself, and
Edison's phonograph doll, the actual first recording of a woman's voice.
All this work is different from the
Digital Needle software written by Ofer Springer, a university student from Israel (
previously,
twice), which was more of a proof-of-concept project than an effort to archive broken or fragile media.
One more prior post, this on
Phonozoic, dedicated to the history of the phonograph and related media.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:37 PM on February 10 [1 favorite]