Alexander Graham Bell foresaw many things, including that people could someday talk over a telephone. Yet the inventor certainly never could have anticipated that his audio-recording experiments in a Washington, D.C., lab could be recovered 130 years later and played for a gathering of scientists, curators and journalists.
“To be or not to be…” a man’s voice can be heard saying in onerecording as it was played on a computer at the Library of Congresson Tuesday. The speaker from the 1880s recites a portion of Hamlet’s Soliloquy as a green wax disc crackles to life from computer speakers.
The early audio recordings — which revealed recitations of Shakespeare, numbers and other familiar lines — had been packed away and deemed obsolete at the Smithsonian Institution for more than a century. But new technology has allowed them to be recovered and played. via Yahoo news
December 14, 2011
