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First-Ever Captured Edison Audio Recording Unveiled
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 What
is believed to be the oldest playable recording of an American voice has been revealed at the
Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, New York. Digital mastering of the extremely
rare, extremely fragile tinfoil medium has produced an audible 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified
song, followed by a man's voice reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard."
The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the
wrong words in the second nursery rhyme. "Look at me; I don't know the song," he says. The singer/speaker
is identified as St. Louis newspaper writer Thomas Mason. Recordings like this, which was made
during an Edison phonograph
demonstration in 1878, are so rare because typically they would wear through after just a couple
playbacks, whereupon the demonstrator would tear the foil into pieces and hand it out as souvenirs.
Optical techniques were used to read the recorded indentations rather than risking making physical
contact. The algorithm attempted to mimic the physics of the original stylus in the same manner
as done for a 1860 paper recording by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, a French printer credited
with inventing the earliest known sound recording device.
Posted 2012 |
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