Alexander Graham Bell’s 130-year-old record collection has been resurrected

In the 1880s , Alexander Graham Bell and his associates at Washington , DC ’s Volta Laboratory experiment with unlike method acting of audio transcription . These nineteenth century audio engineer immortalized snippets of greenhouse rhymes and a Shakespearean monologue to climb discs .

The recording would languish in the National Museum of American History ’s archives for X , as curators lacked the machinery to by rights play these invaluable early forays into register sound .

But thanks to some 21st century aural wizardry , research worker have been able-bodied to bring back six of the two - hundred Volta recordings .

Museum archivists work with a squad from the Library of Congress and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to carefully play these discs , which admit such easy listening as a military man pronouncing the word “ barometer ” and another confrere announce , “ It ’s the 11th day of March 1885 . ”

It ’s unclear if any of the voices on the Volta recordings belong to Alexander Graham Bell , but it is n’t improbable . explain Berkeley Lab investigator Carl Haber of this heady time in audio engine room history :

From 1881 to 1885 , they were enter sound mechanically . They record sound magnetically . They memorialise strait optically , with brightness level . They tried to reproduce strait with mechanically skillful tools , also with jets of air and liquid state . It was an detonation of ideas that they tried [ … ] There are periods of meter when a sure grouping of people end up in a sure place and a luck of music gets create , or nontextual matter - Paris in the 1920s and ’ 30s . There are these magic moments , and I think that historiographer and scholar of technology and invention are view Washington in the 1880s as being one of those second .

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