A recording of Thomas Edison from 1929 is recovered!

[thewayne]

It was a radio broadcast commemorating the "Edison Light's Golden Jubilee" and an unlabeled recording was discovered in the vaults of a museum. The recording was made on a pallophotophone, of which no examples still exist. It used sprocketless 35mm film to record 8-10 audio tracks. It was shown to a retired GE engineer who holds something like 16 patents, he recognized a possibility for rebuilding a pallophotophone, got together with another engineering bud, and they built a new device and were able to play the audio film and record it!

The museum where it was discovered, the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium, has the world's largest collection of pre-1931 radio broadcasts.

Edison was 88, he died two years after this recording was made.

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=942480

This video shows the reinvented machine in action: http://www.timesunion.com/multimedia/video/TUvideo.asp?title=Preserving+history&vidid=96943677001&bccapt=Freeing+Thomas+Edison%27s+voice.+%28Paul+Grondahl+%2F+Times+Union%29

http://www.gereports.com/edison-speaks-cracking-the-pallophotophone-code/

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/18/162204/80-Year-Old-Edison-Recording-Resurrected

Comments

[silveradept]

Whoo, living in the future, and thus being able to reverse-engineer the past! Great story. Could we shop it around to our modern inventors now, saying, "This is why you need to think about future people being able to read your work."?