The Oldest Voices We Can Still Hear

in the summer of 1877 rumors began circulating that a young engineer in New Jersey had invented a talking machine at first the difficulty most professionals had in believing such a story prevented it from becoming news that changed in December when the young man walked into the office of the Scientific American and placed before the editors a small simple machine without offering much of an explanation the visitor simply turned the crank and to the astonishment of all present the machine said good morning how do you do how do you like the photograph invented by Thomas Edison the photograph was the first device to both record and replay sound and it quickly became a sensation in the following months Edison's secluded laboratory at Meno Park was flooded with journalists and his public demonstrations of the device Drew enormous crowds all those who heard it from the president of the United States on down reacted with disbelief there was something of an almost occult nature about a machine that could talk and that could one day even revive the voices of the Dead the 1800s aren't usually remembered through sound while photographs allow us to see the century more vividly than any before it the stern-faced victorians stare back at us in Silence from their portraits it was only in the 20th century that the phenomenon of playing back voices became so common that we take it for granted but the technology to do so existed far earlier allowing us to listen to the distant Echoes of people who lived centuries ago this video is dedicated to the oldest voices that can still be [Music] heard the first words ever spoken into the photograph were the opening lines of the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb made by Edison himself this recording is unfortunately no longer preserved but even if it were it wouldn't be the oldest one ever made because what Edison had really pioneered was the playback of sound he wasn't the first to record it already in the 1850s a Frenchman called Edward Deon Scott de Martinville had developed a device that could inscribe Airborne sounds onto paper recoded in lampac known as the phon autograph it was made to automate the process of writing down speech and so its recordings called phonograms were never supposed to be played back they were meant to be read a printer and book seller by trade Leon Scott was interested in stenography and believed that the lines traced by his machine embodied a form of natural Shand that could one day be deciphered and read by ey just like text store sheet music unlike a human stenographer the photograph would write down everything that was being said instantaneously including the way words were pronounced and it never made any mistakes but despite his efforts Scott never succeeded in deciphering his recordings and the machine instead found use as a laboratory instrument for the study of Acoustics for 150 years collections of his work lay silent and forgotten in various French institutions until in 2007 a number of them were rediscovered by an American team of researchers the following year they used high resolution digital scans to convert one of the photograms into an audio file what they found on it was Humanity's first playable recording of its own voice it features part of the French folk song Oar dun and was made in 1860 a year before the outbreak of the American Civil War at a time when France was still ruled by Emperor Napoleon the third initially it was thought to be sung by a woman or a child but the researchers leading the project later found their misunderstanding about an included reference frequency had resulted in a doubling of the correct playback speed when slowed down the recording instead reveals the voice of Scott himself singing slowly and deliberately into his machine [Music] probably made shortly afterwards another of Scott's phonograms contain the opening lines of a 16th century play called aminta by the Italian poet torquato taso this is the earliest known recording of intelligible human [Music] [Music] [Music] speech in Scott's last known pH autogram dated to late September 1860 he sings once again but this time a much more lively song it has been identified as la de la the song of The Bee from the comic Opera len toas by Victor massay it was first performed in 1856 Just 4 years [Music] earlier in collaboration with the instrument maker Rudolph kerig Scott managed to sell several dozen pH autographs to Scientific Laboratories and to schools but he never made much money from his machine in 1878 he was devastated when Thomas Edison received accolades from around the world for the invention of the phonograph while his own work of 20 years earlier was ignored by the Press he wrote in his Memoirs that quote I ask for only one reward for my efforts to not forget to pronounce my name in this matter for I'm getting old the father of two sons and all I can leave them is my good name Leon Scott died the next year in 1879 at the age of 62 left without funds or pension his family was forced to yield his remains to an unmarked grave his final resting place remains unknown although the photograph won Edison worldwide Fame a lot of work remained to be done before it could be turned into into a commercially viable product one major problem was that it recorded Sound by making indentations on tin foil this fragile material was prone to tearing and would wear out after just a couple of playbacks as a result the few tin full recordings that remain can't be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them but just like with Scott's phonograms they can be optically scanned and then played back digitally this has been successfully done in a couple of cases like the following recording from 1878 it opens with a 23 Second cornet solo of an unidentified song followed by a man's voice reciting popular nursery rhymes the sound quality is very poor but you can just about make out Mary had a little lamb and old mother hubard as well as the man's loud bursts of laughter According to some articles he messes up the words at the end and says look at me I don't know the song [Music] that's know this recording was made during a demonstration of the photograph held on June 22nd 1878 it took place at the Steinberg hat shop in downtown St Louis the second building to the left in this photo and was organized by Thomas Mason a funny sketch writer who went by the pen name ofek in the St Louis Republican Mason had bought one of Edison's photographs back 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 heatwave swept across the state he was 49 years old since Leon Scott only died in Spring the next year that would make him the earliest recorded person to pass away an even earlier tinf fall recording from 1877 has also been digitized it's in the possession of the British Library although exactly how it got there is unknown the strip is accompanied by a letter from EMG handmade gramophones limited addressed to a Mrs Morris Davis and dated the 16th of April 1937 she had asked EMG to transfer the recording but they couldn't because quote we have no method whatever of playing the recording and we doubt very much whether any such method is in existence on the transfer of the tinf Fall we can just about make out a woman's voice but no words are discernible the only clue about the subject of the recording comes from the Letter's envelope which Bears the name Harriet Martino Martino was an English writer and philosopher renowned in her day as a journalist political Economist slavery abolitionist and feminist but she died in 1876 crucially the year before Edison invented the photograph so the voice can't belong to her to the best of my knowledge however this is the oldest playable recording of a recognizable female voice and the woman is likely quoting from one of Martino's works the last recording I'd like to show you here was made much later than the ones we've listened to so far but is in many ways the most remarkable in 1889 Edison employee Theo waman was traveling across Europe to exhibit a new improved version of the phonograph that captured sound on wax instead of tinf foil during the trip he recorded various musical performances as well as the voices of many famous historical figures one of them was Field Marshal helmet Von mka the Elder who was born in 1800 technically the last year of the 18th century he is the earliest born person whose voice has survived now approaching his '90s the old man had a long and distinguished career behind him regarded as one of the finest military minds of his generation he had served as chief of staff for the Prussian Army for 30 years under mulus leadership the prussians had proved Victorious against Denmark Austria and France Paving the way for the unification of Germany he stepped down from his post in 1888 retiring to his country estate at 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 to be a considerable linguist it was also described as silent in in seven languages despite this of all the hundreds of millions of people born in the 18th century his is the only voice that has yet to fade away and perhaps it will continue to be heard for centuries to come he is known to have made at least four recordings during Wan's visit of which only two are preserved in them he recited lines from Gus F and Shakespeare's Hamlet and made the following congratulatory message to Edison note that he had to repeat his statement having initially conflated the photograph with the telephone a mistake that he wasn't alone in [Applause] making [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] Mery said helmet V malka died at his home in Berlin on the 24th of April 1891 after a short illness he received a state funeral and thousands of troops led by the Kaiser escorted his casket to Berlin's Lara Railroad Station from which he was transported to sinisha he was interred in the family melum on the cow estate which was plundered at the end of World War II no one knows what happened to his remains after that but like you foresaw his voice still lives [Music] on [Music]

Channel: Kings and Things

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Id: iEDvozbyUMQ

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2023