We might grumble about the clarity of our cell phone calls (“Can you hear me now?!”), but the technology has come a long way since 1885, when Alexander Graham Bell was tinkering with sound recordings in his Washington, D.C. lab.
How do we know that? The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History today released a recording of Bell testing his audio-recording technology – the first time his voice has ever been heard.
The museum houses 200 of the earliest audio recordings ever made inside Bell’s Washington, D.C., Volta laboratory. But until now, it was unclear which recording featured Bell’s voice. Among those recordings, the museum found a loose leaf of paper with a transcript of a recording, signed and dated by Bell. Working with the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the transcript was matched up with a wax-on-binder-board disc that carried the initials “AGB” and was dated April 15, 1885.
Researchers couldn’t exactly just throw it on a record player and have a listen, though. The Berkeley Lab team had to use a technique it jointly developed in 2002 to create a high-resolution digital map of the disc.
“This map is then processed to remove evidence of wear or damage (e.g., scratches and skips),” the Smithsonian said. “Finally, software calculates the motion of a stylus moving through the disc or cylinder’s grooves, reproducing the audio content and producing a standard digital sound file.”
In 2011, the team successfully recovered six discs from the Volta Lab, which were recorded between 1881 and 1885.
In the recording that features Bell’s voice (below), the Scottish-born inventor can be heard counting and reading out various numbers and dollar amounts for about four minutes. At the 3:53 point, though, you can hear him say: “This record has been made by Alexander Graham Bell in the presence of Dr. Chichester A. Bell [Bell’s cousin] on the 15th of April, 1885 at the Volta Laboratory, 1221 Connecticut Avenue, Washington, D.C. In witness whereof, hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.”
His voice sounds as though it’s off in the distance and perhaps underwater, but it’s quite the feat given that it was recorded more than 128 years ago.
The museum said it has also identified the voice of Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor’s father. He can be heard on a Sept. 1881 recording reciting a line from Hamlet.
“Identifying the voice of Alexander Graham Bell—the man who brought us everyone else’s voice—is a major moment in the study of history,” said John Gray, director of the museum. “Not only will this discovery allow us to further identify recordings in our collection, it enriches what we know about the late 1800s—who spoke, what they said, how they said it—and this formative period for experimentation in sound.”
according to pcmag.com
