Restoration specialists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA have used technology previously used in the field of particle physics to recreate recordings created by Alexander Graham Bell, his cousin Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter in the 1880s.
Carl Haber and Earl Cornell used the technology to create a visual map of the surface of a disc. In the past a 2D scanner had been able to get a low quality version of audio discs, but the new IRENE/3D scanner enables the technicians to get accurate surface maps and even copy wax cylinders, which previously was not possible.
For those of you who love raw data, check out the results, straight from the lab, at http://bio16p.lbl.gov/. This link includes links to audio files of the actual reproduced discs. My favourite one can be heard here. It is my favourite because a voice can be heard saying “It’s the eleventh day of March, eighteen hundred and eighty five,” before reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb – which was exactly 97 years before I was born!
Be sure to explore the remaining audio files on that page. If you’re a history buff like me, you’ll find them quite amazing.
Alexander Bell is most famous for inventing the telephone, but during this time he was also working on improving the fidelity of recorded sound.
With each development, the Volta labs sent a disc to the Smithsonian museum for safekeeping, but had never sent the machinery to play the discs, so they remained unheard for over a century.
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