1888 Recording Discovered: Edison Talking Doll

[scotrace]

At first, Edison was rather short-sighted in his plans for the phonograph. He didn't foresee it as a means of delivering popular entertainment, and, having invented the technology (or being the first to make it work), he let it go to concentrate on the light bulb and the considerable support technology needed to bring it to market.

But others did see the potential; the patent wars for sound recording went on for decades.

In the late 1880's, Edison was fiddling with different means of making use of his invention, including a rather bizarre talking doll, with a metal cylinder recording tucked inside.
The National Park Service has turned one up. Have a listen to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star sung by a ghostly voice, the singer long dead and forgotten.

 

[JimWagner]

Very interesting. More interesting to me is the scanning and programming that allowed the recovery of the audio without having to actually further degrade the recording media. That technology opens the door to recovering many old recordings too fragile to play on the original equipment and needles. Maybe we'll get to hear many old recordings that haven't been heard in decades or even generations.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Fascinating. I must say though, the recording is a bit....creepy.

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

Very cool and a marvel in it's time. In the intervening 100 years from 1888 to 1988 we made it all the way to the compact disc. I wonder what we will have in the next 100 years.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Fascinating. I must say though, the recording is a bit....creepy.

Recorded seventeen years before Edison, this is believed to be the first known recording of a human voice.

Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville -- Au Clair De La Lune (1860)

On 9th March 2008, this ethereal 10 second clip of a man (or woman) singing the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune", was played for the first time in 150 years. It is currently thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice, predating Thomas Edison's first phonograph recording of 1877. The "phonautograph", created by etching soot-covered paper by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, was played by US scientists using a "virtual stylus" to read the lines. The recording was initially believed to be the voice of a woman or adolescent, but further research in 2009 suggested the playback speed had been too high and that it was actually the voice of Scott himself. This would make sense since it would have been scott operating the machine, which is easier to time if you yourself are also producing the sound. (Incidentally, the "phonautograph" was designed only to record sounds, not to play them back. Thomas Edison was still the first to reproduce recorded sound.)

[video=youtube;uBL7V3zGMUA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBL7V3zGMUA[/video]

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

Too bad it didn't quite work. We may well have had recordings of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. But why make a machine to record sound if there is no means to play it back?? [huh]

 

[CantorFan]

I am thoroughly creeped out at both the doll and the recording but I love the science behind how we are able to listen to it today. I am in awe with what we can hear with this technology in the future just like Jim had said earlier. I also love the link in the article that leads me to listen to over 100 of Thomas Edison recordings in many different categories. http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/the-recording-archives.htm