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.

Re:Neither Only nor Best

[Anonymous Coward]

Even so, they mentioned seven canisters. Assuming 1000 ft canisters at what would be 24 FPS, we get approximately 77 minutes of audio? I don't know how long the broadcast was, but if that is longer than the broacast, perhaps it has additional material.

If not, there still could exist other audio reels in this format someplace or other, which could benefit from the machine designed to recover the audio.

Re:Old technology more lasting

[MoeDumb]

Very true. One need only think reel-to-reel audio tapes. Try finding a deck to play them other than refurbished units on Ebay. I'm currently converting my tapes to lossless audiofiles and storing them on an external HDD. Then back ups of that.

Link to actual project at General Electric

[Animats]

Link to actual project at General Electric [gereports.com], including access to the Edison audio.

Re:Scanner

[mangu]

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...

100 years from now we will probably have desktop universal disassemblers that can record the position of every atom in an object. That will take care of thumb drives. CDs and DVDs will be even easier, use that high-resolution ultraviolet scanner to read the surface.

Re:Scanner

[Bryan3000000]

My thoughts as well. However, judging by the opinions of the archivists at the Library of Congress, photographic media are a terrifically better long-term preservation strategy than magnetic tape or magnetic media of any variety: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/09/gallery-digitizing-t.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+boingboing/iBag+(Boing+Boing) [boingboing.net]

It seems to me that you could get incredible fidelity and preservation characteristics for audio recordings by using photographic media, which could then be played back either with a machine or as you suggest, by scanning. I'm sure it would be possible to construct a continuous feed scanner that could output either to an image file or process directly to an audio stream.

Either way, it seems like these guys took the long way through the problem, essentially trying to re-create an original machine rather than using modern technology to read what was on the tape. I'm guessing a continuous-feed scanner with reels attached could be hacked relatively quickly from mostly commodity parts, and the doing the rest in software would be far more interesting and hold far more long-term usefulness. I'm betting you could get it to produce an image plus simultaneous analog and digital data-streams from one sensor.