Audio recordings of Alexander Bella

The National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institute has begun a new project to restore its collection of 300 experimental audio recordings made by Alexander Bell and his laboratory from 1881 to 1892. These are one of the oldest records of sounding speech in the world.

Bell and his colleagues, including his cousin Chicheter Bell, developed recording methods first in the Alessandro Volta laboratory in Washington (opened by Bell with money from the Volta Prize received by him for the invention of the phone), and then in the Bell's Summer House in New Scotland. The first records were made on Bella’s phono -automation , the apparatus is so experimental that there was no way to reproduce these records. In 1886, Alexander and Chichester Bella, as well as Charles Teinter, received a patent for a graphophone - a device for recording and playing sound, where the sound was recorded on a cardboard cylinder with a waxed surface. After receiving a patent, work to improve the sound recording technology continued.

The records were never published and quickly became unsuitable for reproduction, since the devices on which they were made stopped working, and the materials used were too fragile to even try to reproduce them. Now, to reproduce these records, the Lawrence National Laboratory in Berkeley successfully used the optical image and the “virtual stylus”. For the first time, this technology was created in the Lawrence Laboratory in 2002 and then for many years was improved in joint projects with the library of Congress and other scientific institutions.

In the process, a digital card of a disk or high resolution cylinder is created. Then the card is processed to remove traces of wear or damage (for example, scratches). Finally, the software calculates the movement of a virtual stylus that moves through the virtual plate grooves, as shown on the map, which allows you to play audio and create a standard digital sound file.

The National Museum of American History has been cooperating with the Lawrence Laboratory in the restoration of sound from Bell experimental records since 2011. In 2013, the project participants found the first record of the voice of Alexander Bell. Bell himself, in the hand made by hand on the wax layer, called this entry a test for “reproduction of numbers”. At the end of the audio recordings were the words: “This entry was made by Alexander Graham Bell in the presence of Dr. Chicheter A. Bell on April 15, 1885 in the Volta laboratory for Connectic-Avenue, 1221, Washington, and the District of Colombia. In confirmation of what to listen to my voice. Alexander Graham Bell. "

In total, in the course of the 2011, 2013 and 2019, it was possible to restore twenty records made in the Volta laboratory. But hundreds of more remain unheard. “During the three years of the project“ History of Hearing: Restoring Sound from the experimental records of Alexander Graham Bell, ”We will maintain about 300 records for the first time, which are in the collections of the museum for more than a century, not heard by anyone,” said the director of the museum Anteus Khartig. “We are grateful to this public-private partnership for financing this dynamic and innovative work.”