Alexander Graham Bell sealed his voice in tin boxes in 1885. It took 128 years and a beam of light to hear it
Carl Haber, a scientist, discovered a way to listen to the recordings.
For almost 128 years, researchers and scientists believed the voice recordings Alexander Graham Bell sent to the Smithsonian Museum were "mute artifacts." But in 2013, there was a breakthrough. Carl Haber, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, discovered a way to listen to the recordings without destroying them, Smithsonian Magazine reported in a Jan 14, 2012, video. Recently, Alex Davis, the founder of Embertone, took to Instagram on August 20 to share a short clip of Bell's voice recorded on April 15, 1885, on Tempest Instruments (@tempestinstruments). The video reached 1.3 million viewers, 122,000 likes, and 347 comments.
First recording of 'barometer'
Bell sent several of his recordings in tin boxes to the Smithsonian, should he need to prove what he invented and when. For almost a century, no one knew how to listen to the recording without destroying it because the machines used back then had disappeared. Charlotte Gray, a biographer, revealed that Bell experimented with recording sound on wax, copper, and cardboard.
But in 1884, he managed to photograph sound. Davis explained, "Someone spoke into a device that made a beam of light flicker along their voice, and that flickering beam traced a wavy line onto a spinning disc coated in chemicals. The shape of that wave is the sound, frozen on glass, a picture of somebody saying the word 'barometer.'"
'Hear my voice'
As mentioned, researchers made a breakthrough in 2013. They finally recovered Bell's voice recorded on a wax and cardboard disc and also found a transcript of the recording in his handwriting. It was dated April 15, 1885, and it matched the inscription on the wax disc, along with the initials "AGB." To listen to it, Haber used a beam of light to scan the disc’s grooves without damaging it. Then, software with a virtual stylus moved along the grooves of the virtual record, recreating the audio as a digital file. This allowed the recording to be played back without physically touching or destroying the fragile disc. For most of the recording, Bell read out numbers. Right before it ended, he said, "Hear my voice. Alexander Graham Bell."
Project 'recover sound'
So far, researchers have managed to recover sound from only 20 experimental recordings at the Volta Laboratory. Only one of Bell's voice recordings has been recovered. The Smithsonian then launched a new project aimed at restoring hundreds of never-heard-before recordings made by Bell and his colleagues between 1881 and 1892 at the Volta Laboratory and on Bell's property in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.
In 2023, Anthea M. Hartig, the museum's Elizabeth MacMillan director, said, "Over the three-year duration of this remarkable project, 'Hearing History: Recovering Sound from Alexander Graham Bell's Experimental Records,' we will preserve and make accessible for the first time about 300 recordings that have been in the museum’s collections for over a century, unheard by anyone."
Bell's century-old voicemail
Viewers were impressed by how science and technology managed to recover Bell's voice. @everlovin_wanderer wrote, "Man told us how to say his name, and we still say Gram instead of Gray-Ham?" @_andrea__miano_ stated, "You mean Meucci? He invented the telephone. Bell patented it."
You can follow Tempest Instruments (@tempestinstruments) on Instagram for more sound-history content.
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