Soundtrack to history: 1878 Edison audio unveiled

Soundtrack to history: 1878 Edison audio unveiled

Schenectady (New York): It’s scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world’s first recorded blooper.
    The modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a musical performance, thanks to digital advances that allowed the sound to be transferred from flimsy tinfoil to computer. The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St Louis in 1878.
    At a time when music lovers can carry thousands of digital songs on a player the size of a pack of gum, Edison’s tinfoil playback seems prehistoric. But that dinosaur opens a key window into the development of recorded sound.
    The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man’s voice reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Old Mother Hubbard”. The man laughs at two spots when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme. “Look at me; I don’t know the song,” he says.
    When the recording is played during a presentation on Thursday, it likely will be the first time it has been played publicly since it was created during an Edison phonograph demonstration held on June 22, 1878, in St Louis, museum officials said.
    The recording was made on a sheet of tinfoil, 12.5cm wide by 37.5cm long, placed on the cylinder of the phonograph Edison invented in 1877 and began selling the following year. AP

PLAY IT AGAIN: Thomas Alva Edison listening to a wax cylinder phonograph in 1888