

Recovered: Thomas Edison’s Voice, frozen in time for more than 80 years - cwan
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=942480

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Rhapso
Edison was not as wonderful as common history proclaims him to be. None of his
inventions worked well, and most of them were invented by his staff but
accredited to him, he was an arsonist and he unfairly slandered his
competitors. I really hope people today avoid him as a role model.

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kiba
And Alexander Graham Bell fought a patent battle against Elisha Gray, who is
arguably an independent inventor of the telephone. There were even allegation
that Bell stole the invention from Gray.

James Watt is a monopolist who managed to get the government to extend his
patent privileges. He waste his time enforcing his monopoly instead of using
his brain to invent better steam engines.

Yeah, the heroic inventors are not what they seem to be.

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Rhapso
Tesla was ;p Although I admit to be a biased worshiper. He designed all his
inventions in his head, then drafted and assembled them (they all worked the
1st time). He was so unaggressive in attacking other people financially he got
screwed over. It is unlikely you have used a direct invention (not a
derivative/improvement) of Bell's nor Edison's but I can be certain you are
typing on a computer that uses an AC power supply or charger and thus know you
have use one of Tesla's.

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chegra
Tesla didn't like fat people and once fired a woman for being overweight. He
believed in eugenics. Tesla was critical of Einstein work, calling it
Mathematical garb. Everybody have their faults.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#Personal_life>

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WalterBright
It would seem easier to just scan the film, then write some software instead
of building a special machine.

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phaedrus
Exactly! In fact the software that does that even already exists! I read a
news story earlier this year about a team which was using that technique to
restore old phonograph records that are too fragile to play. They even used it
to successfully reconstruct the audio from fragments a record that had
_already shattered_. In the article (I forget now whether it was on NPR or
Wired) they mention that the software is flexible enough to follow a linear
stream whether the line wraps around a flat record or a cylindrical
gramophone; likely it'd work on this medium as well.

(I can readily imagine 80 years from now, when they want to reconstruct the
audio from an old CD, they'll take a picture of it from 3 feet away with a
digital camera and it would be able to resolve the pits on the CD into a data
stream.)

Many engineers have a tendency to "imprint on" a certain set of technologies
and keep tools in their mental toolbox from early in their career. Even most
brilliant engineers will do this - technology moves very fast and using the
tools you know saves time and effort up front even if new technologies exists
that are less time long term. I'd never dream of belittling the hard work they
obviously must have done to reconstruct this pallophotophone, but I do notice
that in the picture from the article the engineer is not young, and I do think
it likely he built a mechanical device only because that's what he knows. If a
millennial were doing this project, absolutely he'd try it with software
first. But my generation can't be too smug because we're not immune to the
effect. Maybe the next generation from now would (to give a random example)
first think of growing a piece of biological wetware to do it.

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Jun8
Great story and audio! It's saddening to think how many such important
treasures are rotting away forgotten on shelves (think the last scene of
Indiana Hones, Raiders of the Lost Ark).

My other thought when I looked at the team photos in the article is: Engineers
who can do this type of wizardry are always old, e.g. 50+ or more. I think in
our current emphasis on software engineering, we have raised (myself included)
generations of students who just doesn't have the same level of comfort with
working with their hands on hardware.

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noonespecial
I think rather than pulleys, sprockets and photo-transistors, modern tinkerers
would just feed the whole mess through a modern-day 35mm film digitizer
(they're quite common) and then just use a little software to work out what
the squiggles represent.

Edit: A post appeared suggesting this very thing as I typed. I hate when that
happens.

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mikecane
Disappointed they use a Flash player to share it. Audacity will rip that to an
MP3. I'd like to hear those other recordings. I hope someone clues them into
the Internet Archive! [edited for typo]

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superk
Does anyone know if there's a link to the actual audio file somewhere so I
could hear it?

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Jasber
In the left column you can click "Hear the audio" under Multimedia. Not the
most visible place.

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trafnar
Video: Hear the audio

:)

