The Oldest Voices We Can Still Hear

In the summer of 1877, rumors began to circulate that a young engineer from New Jersey had invented a talking machine. At first, the difficulty that most professionals had in believing such a story prevented it from becoming news, which changed in December when the young man entered the Scientific American office and placed a small, simple machine before the editors without offering much. explanation the visitor simply turned the crank and to the astonishment of everyone present the machine said good morning, how are you? How do you like the photography invented by Thomas Edison? The photograph was the first device to record and reproduce sound and quickly became a sensation in the following months.

Edison's isolated laboratory in Meno Park was inundated with journalists, and his public demonstrations of the device drew enormous crowds to all who

hear

d it from the president. of the United States and down reacted with disbelief there was something of almost hidden nature in a machine that could talk and that could one day even revive the

voices

of the dead the 19th century is not usually remembered through sound, while photographs they allow us to see During the century more vividly than any other, the stern-faced Victorians look at us in Silence from their portraits. It wasn't until the 20th century that the phenomenon of playing

voices

became so common that we take it for granted, but the technology to do so existed long before that, allowing us to

hear

the distant echoes of people who lived centuries ago.

This video is dedicated to the

oldest

voices that can

still

be heard. The first words spoken in the photograph were the first lines of the nursery rhyme Mary Had a. Little Lamb made by Edison himself, unfortunately this recording is no longer preserved, but even if it were, it would not be the

oldest

ever made because what Edison really pioneered was sound reproduction, he was not the first to record it . In the 1850s, a Frenchman named Edward Deon Scott de Martinville had developed a device that could inscribe airborne sounds on a lampac-encoded paper known as a phon autograph.

It was created to automate the process of writing speech, so its recordings called phonograms were never supposed to work. being reproduced were intended to be read by a printer and bookseller Leon Scott was interested in shorthand and believed that the lines drawn by his machine embodied a natural Shand shape that could one day be deciphered and read by hey as if it were a text. stored sheet music, unlike a human stenographer, the photograph wrote down everything that was said instantly, including the way the words were pronounced, and never made any mistakes, but despite his efforts, Scott never managed to decipher his recordings and the machine found use as a laboratory.

Instrument for the study of acoustics For 150 years, collections of his works remained silent and forgotten in various French institutions until in 2007 several of them were rediscovered by a team of American researchers. The following year, they used high-resolution digital scans to convert one of the frames into an audio file, which they found was humanity's first playable recording of its own voice. It includes part of the French folk song Oar dun and was performed in 1860, a year before the outbreak of the American Civil War at a time when France was

still

ruled by Emperor Napoleon III. It was initially thought to have been sung by a woman or child, but researchers leading the project later discovered that their misunderstanding of an included reference frequency had resulted in a doubling of the correct playback speed when the recording was slowed down. instead, it reveals Scott's own voice singing slowly and deliberately into his machine, probably made shortly afterward.

Another of Scott's phonograms contains the opening lines of a 16th-century work called Aminta, by the Italian poet Torquato Taso. This is the oldest known recording of intelligible human speech in Scott's last known pH autogram dates from late September 1860. He sings it once again, but this time a much livelier song that has been identified as that of the , The Bee's song from Victor Massay's comic opera len toas. It was first performed in 1856. Just 4 years earlier, in collaboration with instrument maker Rudolph Kerig Scott, he managed to sell several dozen pH autographs to scientific laboratories and schools, but never made much money from his machine.

In 1878 he was devastated when Thomas Edison received worldwide praise for the invention of the phonograph while his own work of 20 years earlier was ignored by the press, he wrote in his Memoirs which he quotes I ask only for a reward for my efforts to not forget to pronounce my name in this matter because I am becoming an old father of two children and all I can leave you is my good name Leon Scott died the following year in 1879 at the age of 62 without funds or pension his family was forced to hand over his remains to an unmarked grave his final resting place remains unknown, although photography gained Edison worldwide fame, there was still much work to be done before it could become a commercially viable product.

A major problem was that he recorded sound by making notches in aluminum foil. This brittle material was prone to breakage and would break. As a result, the few complete recordings that remain cannot be played back with a stylus without severely damaging them, but as with Scott's phonograms, they can be scanned optically and then played back digitally. performed successfully in a couple of cases, such as the following recording from 1878, it opens with a 23-second bugle solo of an unidentified song followed by a male voice reciting popular nursery rhymes. The sound quality is very poor, but you can almost make out that Mary had a little lamb and old mother Hubard, as well as the man's loud laughter.

According to some articles, he mixes up the words at the end and says look at me, I don't know the song I know, this recording was made during a demonstration of the Photograph taken on June 22, 1878, it took place at the Steinberg hat shop in downtown St Louis, the second building on the left in this photo, and was organized by Thomas Mason, a funny sketch writer who called himself ofek at the St Louis Republican Mason. He had purchased one of Edison's photographs in April for $95. an incredible sum of money in 1878 and The Voice is believed to belong to him just 3 weeks after the event Mason died of sunstroke in Elston Missouri when a heat wave swept through the state he was 49 years old as Leon Scott only died the following spring year that would make him the first recorded person to die, an even earlier fall recording from 1877 has also been digitized.

It is in the possession of the British Library, although exactly how he got there is unknown. The strip is accompanied by a hand-made EMG card. limited gramophones addressed to Mrs. Morris Davis and dated April 16, 1937. She had asked EMG to transfer the recording but they could not because, quote, we have no method of reproducing the recording and we very much doubt that such a method is available. In the Fall can transfer we can make out a woman's voice, but no words are made out. The only clue to the subject of the recording comes from the envelope of the letter bearing Harriet Martino's name.

Martino was a renowned English writer and philosopher. her in her time as a journalist, political economist, slavery abolitionist and feminist, but she died in 1876, crucially a year before Edison invented photography, so, as far as I know, her voice does not it may belong to you; however, this is the oldest playable recording of a recognizable character. The female voice and the woman is probably quoting one of Martino's works. The last recording I would like to show you here was made much later than the ones we have heard so far, but it is in many ways the most notable from 1889.

Edison's Employee. Theo Waman was traveling through Europe to exhibit a new, improved version of the phonograph that captured sound on wax instead of aluminum foil. During the trip he recorded several musical performances, as well as the voices of many famous historical figures, one of them being Field Marshal Von. mka the Elder, who was born in 1800, technically the last year of the 18th century, is the first person born whose voice has survived Now, approaching 90, the old man had a long and distinguished career behind him, considered one of the best military minds. of his generation had served as chief of staff of the Prussian army for 30 years under the leadership of the mulus the Prussians had been victorious against Denmark, Austria and France Paving the way for the unification of Germany he left his position in 1888 and retired to his country estate in CAU in Sesia now located in Poland it was here that Wangan met him a year later while traveling from Berlin to Vienna Von Molka was a stern man of few words, which led him to be called the Great Silent One known for being a considerable linguist.

Despite this, he was also described as silent in seven languages, of all the hundreds of millions of people born in the 18th century, his voice is the only one that has not yet faded and may continue to be heard in the centuries. coming. He is known to have made at least four recordings during Wan's visit, of which only two survive. He recited lines from Gus F and Shakespeare's Hamlet and made the following congratulatory message to Edison, noting that having to repeat his statement after initially combining the photograph with the phone was a mistake he was not the only one to make Mery said the Hull V Malka died at his home in Berlin on April 24, 1891 after a brief illness he received a state funeral and thousands of troops led by the Kaiser escorted his coffin to the Lara train station in Berlin, from where it was transported to Sinisha.

He was buried in the family melum on the cow farm that was looted at the end of the Second World War. No one knows what happened to his remains after that, but as you foresaw, his voice still lives on. in