What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like

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

by Aloha • 13 years ago

105 36 13 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

clubhi• 13 years ago

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

RobertHoudin• 13 years ago

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

rudedogg• 13 years ago

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

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

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

kendroberts• 13 years ago

Link to mp3: http://media.smithsonianmag.com/audio/alexander-graham-bell....

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

Listening to a recording made in 1885. Mind blown.

IvyMike• 13 years ago

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

lutusp• 13 years ago

Gee, that's funny -- I'm pretty sure that is how it's pronounced.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

I was interested to see some people say they've commonly heard it pronounced as a single syllable. I've heard that, but I didn't know it was common.

Here's a website with an audio clip of that pronunciation (http://inogolo.com/pronunciation/Graham)

Here's a website that has many pronunciations. (http://www.forvo.com/search/graham)

The Forvo website is interesting because it has some American (?) accents using the 2 syllable form, and some (Lindsey Graham) using the single syllable form.

(DuckDuckGo's search results were particularly useful for me here.)

chad_oliver• 13 years ago

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

lotharbot• 13 years ago

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

adamt• 13 years ago

That is the way it is pronounced in the uk.

someperson• 13 years ago

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...

...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

pserwylo2• 13 years ago

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...

DanBC2• 13 years ago

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.

marquis2• 13 years ago

I love this Éduouard recording of 'Gamme de la Voix'. You can really hear the singer go out of key on the 'mi' and 'sol', it's that precise. Seeing music visualized for the first time must have been as wondrous as seeing a Michelin map.

Jun8• 13 years ago

The fact that when the earliest recordings were made they had no intention or technology to play them back but now we can (at least to get a rough idea) leads to a fascinating idea: capture of a signal may be decoupled from its playback, which may be impossible with current technology. This, of course, brings to mind the 2011 experiment from UC Berkeley (http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clip...). We shouldn't worry about the horrible quality of the playback for these but focus on recording and preserving the brain activity.

_ZeD_• 13 years ago

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

and... no.

Bell stole the telephone invention to Meucci.

flexie• 13 years ago

Well, at least Antonio Meucci's Globe Telephone Company was sued by the Bell Telephone Company for patent infringement. It was really a messy law suit where one question was whether Meucci had invented the electromagnetic telephone or "just" an acoustic one.

Stwerp• 13 years ago

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.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

How strange is that it looks exactly like a CD?

ygra• 13 years ago

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.

yareally• 13 years ago

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...

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

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...

What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like

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