

What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like - Aloha
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/We-Had-No-Idea-What-Alexander-Graham-Bell-Sounded-Like-Until-Now-204137471.html

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someperson
This is fascinating. For some perspective, it's from April 15, 1885 (128 years
ago).

I recommend this article on Thomas Edison's first recording (1878, 135 years
ago):
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/scient...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/scientists-
recover-the-sounds-of-19th-century-music-and-laughter-from-the-oldest-
playable-american-recording/264147/)

...And the OLDEST HUMAN VOICE RECORDING OF ALL TIME (April 9, 1860 (153 years
ago)), by a guy named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville living in France who
built a machine to produce visual representations of audio with a pencil (for
the study, he didn't know you could replay it):
<http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php>

~~~
pserwylo
Thanks for the links. Your comments about the "OLDEST HUMAN VOICE RECORDING OF
ALL TIME" reminded me about a thought experiment I once heard.

Imagine a pottery wheel spinning thousands of years ago, and people talking as
it spun. Then imagine that for some reason, a stick or other object was
leaning against the wheel, and engraving a pattern. Theoretically, the
vibrations of the people speaking would be picked up (at some level) by this
engraving.

The end result is that if you had a device that was sufficiently sensitive,
and you could remove a sufficiently large amount of noise (caused by other
sources of vibration), then you could reconstruct an actual recording of
people speaking thousands of years ago.

Of course, it is not likely that this will happen in the near future, or even
at all. In fact, a quick search will show that it has already been used as an
April Fools joke by some scientists [0].

However, that is not to say that it is impossible.

The reason I love this thought experiment is because it goes to show that if
you start with the presumption that at some point, our tools become better,
then there are very few limits to what _can_ be found out. What would happen
if you went back 150 years and told everybody that in 150 years, we would have
tools that can track the trajectories of sub-atomic particles as they travel
at speeds horrendously close to the speed of light?

[0] - [http://www.ohgizmo.com/2006/02/20/5000-year-old-
recordings-c...](http://www.ohgizmo.com/2006/02/20/5000-year-old-recordings-
caught-on-pottery/)

~~~
DanBC
Mythbusters did the 'recording in pottery' thing, if you're interested in that
kind of programme.

One of the problems I see is that the pottery surface is inherently noisy, and
the signal is very low. That would make recovering anything terribly remote.
This isn't about needing better resolution to recover the signal, it's about
the signal not being there because it's been obliterated by noise.

~~~
pserwylo
Yup, it sure is noisy. But let me indulge in my (not so realistic, but still
potentially feasible) thought experiment :)

What if it turns out there is actually a predictable pattern to the noise on a
ceramic surface. Perhaps there is a way that the molecules fit together that
mean there is a few rules that govern the noise, such that we can then indeed
remove it from any "recordings".

Or maybe there's some mathematical properties of noise that are yet to be
understood which allow us to remove it correctly.

Or perhaps there is some arm of science which doesn't even exist yet (in the
same way quantum computing didn't exist so long ago).

~~~
atonse
As much as I love the idea of this happening, if we are talking about such
tiny variations, it's just as likely that erosion (air, water, pottery mud)
would've wiped these tiny variations out.

------
yareally
Seeing this reminded me of a few other really old recordings by famous people
I've stumbled upon in the past. I still can't get over the amazement of
finding these recordings most of us thought anyone would have cared to do or
preserve.

Johannes Brahms playing his Hungarian Dance #1 (1889)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brahms_-
_Hungarian_Dance_N...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brahms_-
_Hungarian_Dance_No._1_\(performed_by_the_composer\).oga)

A recording of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1889)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1889_recording_by_Otto_von...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1889_recording_by_Otto_von_Bismarck.ogg)

There's also some others located at the US National Park site[1]. Although we
all have our love/hate of Edison, one of the more positive things he did was
record many famous people out of interest or for the sake of posterity.
William Jennings Bryan, William H. Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Edison himself
and many others are on that site.

[1] [http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/documentary-
recordi...](http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/documentary-recordings-
and-political-speeches.htm)

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anigbrowl
As a sound engineer, listening to this brought a tear to my eye.

------
kendroberts
Link to mp3: [http://media.smithsonianmag.com/audio/alexander-graham-
bell....](http://media.smithsonianmag.com/audio/alexander-graham-bell.mp3)

------
IvyMike
I don't know why, but I really like that he pronounces his middle name "Gray-
am".

~~~
chad_oliver
How do you pronounce it? I'm from New Zealand, and "gray-am" seems to be the
common pronunciation here.

~~~
lotharbot
It's often pronounced "gram" (one short syllable), particularly in American
media.

~~~
asveikau
I am American and have always pronounced it and heard it pronounced with two
syllables. Maybe not as deliberately as the recording. I wonder if he is
talking slowly as he is because it's so new to him, or maybe we're not hearing
it at the right rate, or some combination thereof.

Also, where's the thick Scottish accent?

~~~
smcl
This is actually quite a Scottish accent, however it does not really fit with
the stereotype (Groundskeeper Willy et al). To me (a Scot) it sounds very
similar to George Galloway's accent:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_AOTexf6uc>

There are numerous distinct accents across Scotland despite it being a pretty
tiny country.

~~~
asveikau
I guess my expectation was that the older the recording, the goofier the
accents would sound, due to changes over time. For example, the recordings of
Edison have him sounding like no American alive today.

~~~
smcl
Haha, your average Scot might get upset by any implication that our accent is
in any way "goofy" but I completely understand what you mean

------
_ZeD_
_"the inventor of the world’s most important acoustical device—the telephone"_

and... no.

Bell _stole_ the telephone invention to Meucci.

~~~
Stwerp
Well, the _photophone_ was actually a much cooler device anyway. Experimental
wireless transfer of human speech over 200 meters from a completely passive
device using optical scattering? In 1880? Sweet! The receiver was active, but
transmitter was not at all. Somewhat similar to modern UHF RFID technology.

Bell was actually a pretty awesome engineer largely motivated by wanting to
help the impaired.

------
clubhi
We still don't. The file format in this link was also invented by Bell.

~~~
RobertHoudin
Can you explain what you mean? I don't understand.

~~~
rudedogg
I think he's poking fun that the mp3 file won't play. It isn't for me anyway..

~~~
csense
It doesn't play for me either, using Chromium (the distro pacakge of Google
Chrome) on Linux Mint 14. But view source, Ctrl+F mp3, and doing wget on the
name of the file worked just fine.

They should really make a lossless .wav or .flac available IMHO, but that's a
different gripe...

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ricardobeat
How strange is that it looks exactly like a CD?

~~~
ygra
The center hole is too small or at least its proportions don't match up with a
CD.

But in any case, how would you design a recording device? The text says there
were mostly cylinders and discs, which makes sense because you can put a
spiral track on those. In the disc case you would have to rotate them around
their Z axis which pretty much requires a hole in the center. So I guess it's
not that surprising that Bell's cardboard-and-wax disc, vinyl records,
laserdiscs and CDs all look pretty similar.

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hcarvalhoalves
Listening to a recording made in 1885. Mind blown.

