80-Year-Old Edison Recording Resurrected

embolalia writes "An 80-year-old recording of a live radio broadcast featuring Thomas Edison has been uncovered and reconstituted. The recording was done on an obscure technology called a pallophotophone — Greek for 'shaking light sound' — that uses optical film to reproduce sound. The archivists who uncovered the canisters tucked away on a bottom shelf in a museum in Schenectady, New York (the city where Edison's General Electric was founded), did not have any machine to replay the films. Two GE engineers — working nights and weekends for two years — were able to construct a machine to replay the old tapes, recorded only two years before Edison's death." There's a video at the link, which may or may not contain some of the resurrected recording, but we couldn't get it to play from the Times Union site.

We couldn't get it to play from the Times Union...

[Anonymous Coward]

You need the Flash 10.2 beta which accelerates pallophotophone files.

phallophotophone???

[Black Parrot]

Weren't we talking about this in the chatroulette story a few days ago?

go kdawson

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a video at the link, which may or may not contain some of the resurrected recording, but we couldn't get it to play from the Times Union site.

Why am I not surprised that kdawson wasn't able to figure out how to take the javascript popup link and add it to the base url of the Times Union site?

Re:Wait thirty years...

[Cwix]

Dont worry, those engineers obviously spent two years working on breaking Edison's DRM, I hear hes planning on returing from the dead, and suing for 150k.

Re:We couldn't get it to play from the Times Union

[NeumannCons]

They've pulled the beta off of their website. They received a letter from the lawyers representing the estate of Edison. The lawyers clients are claiming ownership of the ip rights to all pallotophone codecs and pallotophone encryption/decryption algorithms. Said counsel for Bubba Edison - Mr. G. R. White, "Mr. Edison is seeking to ride on his Great Grandfathers coat tails -we aim to help him since that's the right thing to do - and the fact that he's paying us lots of money". Mr. White was not immediately available for comment as he was participating in a feeding frenzy.

Re:Scanner

[CohibaVancouver]

the skills required to decode something like an mp4 file are going to be far in excess of what these two guys needed

Yes and no... In 100 years it will probably go something like this:

"Hey, Computer."
"Yo."
"I found this 100 year old computer file. Can you decode it for me?"
"Sure, just a second."
"Done. It appears to be a video of a caucasian human singing a song from the year 1987."
"Really? What song?"
"Never Gonna Give You Up..."

I suspect 100 years from now reading the data off a thumb drive, CD or DVD will be a bigger challenge that actually decoding the file...