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danie10@squeet.me
Danie

Listen to the oldest known recording of a human voice from 1860 before they could even play it back

Top view of a vintage reel-to-reel tape recorder, showing the two reels.
Thomas Edison is often credited with being the first person to record sound.

But it was in fact a Frenchman named Edouard-Lรฉon Scott de Martinville who invented sound recording via his phonautograph in 1857 โ€“ 20 years before Edison invented his phonograph.

When this was recorded, there was no known way of how to yet play back anything. It was more an experiment to try to replicate how the human ear works. With todayโ€™s technology, though, we can reverse engineer that to reproduce the sound.

This is a 164-year-old recording, many generations ago. Technology itself was still in the era of steam power. Radio, phonographs, gramophones, etc were still a long way away from being invented.

See youtube.com/watch?v=ICVtdcIIsrโ€ฆ
#Blog, #audio, #technology, #vintage

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danie10@squeet.me
Danie

Some of Edisonโ€™s earliest voice recordings of famous Britons from 1888

Two men in formal attire sitting in chairs next to a table. The men are each holding a tube with a funnel at the end towards their mouths. The tubes are connected to a mechanical device on the table. The device can be seen to have a large round cylinder on top, and a number of other metal rods and knobs.
Really eerie listening to these moments captured in time 136 years ago when recording equipment was basically โ€˜unheardโ€™ of. I donโ€™t think many of these people would ever have thought their voices would be heard around the globe at just the click of a mouse 100 years into the future.

The voices of Robert Browning, Arthur Sullivan, Florence Nightingale, a trumpeter from the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, to major political figures like William Gladstone and Queen Victoria.

This really still qualifies as a mechanical invention at the time, but one which had a more significant impact than others, as it brought the ability to us to perceive something from way back with our senses. Prior to this, there was of course photography, but maybe we have become too used to seeing the many photographs that circulate today from way back when.

Hearing an actual voice recording, is to me closer to it being a real experience. The manner of speech, too, is pleasant to behold today when we have become so used to rushed speech, slang, abbreviations, etc.

Listen at youtube.com/watch?v=BrXUcEh0ncโ€ฆ
#Blog, #history, #technology, #vintage

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