historyThe Public Domain Review1878 · Menlo Park, USA
Edison's first recorded words were Mary Had a Little Lamb, and that recording was lost for decades
In 1878 Thomas Edison built a machine with a grooved cylinder wrapped in tinfoil, which could record sound and play it back. He tested it by shouting Mary Had a Little Lamb into it, and the machine played the words back clearly. Edison later described being taken aback, since he was always wary of things that worked the first time. In 1927 he recalled this moment at the Golden Jubilee of the Phonograph. The original recording was long thought lost, until scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Library of Congress recreated it using optical imaging, which reads the sound from the groove without playing the fragile foil.
Sound pressure moves a diaphragm attached to a stylus, which cuts a groove of matching shape into the foil. Playing the groove back moves the stylus in the same pattern, which vibrates the diaphragm and recreates the sound. Optical imaging instead reads the groove's shape with light, so the sound can be decoded without a stylus touching the foil.
It marks the first known recording and playback of human speech, the starting point of sound recording technology. Recovering it with optical imaging shows how modern techniques can read damaged or fragile sound media without destroying them.
Image: The Public Domain Review
