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Inter Natioanl News
Alexander Graham Bell recordings played from 1880s
Alexander Graham Bell foresaw many things, including that people could someday talk over a telephone. But the inventor certainly never could have anticipated that his audio-recording experiments in a Washington, D.C., lab could be recovered 130 years later and played for a gathering of scientists, curators and journalists.
“To be or not to be...” a man’s voice can be heard saying in one recording as it was played on a computer at the Library of Congress on Tuesday. The speaker from the 1880s recites a portion of Hamlet’s Soliloquy as a green wax disc crackles to life from computer speakers.
The early audio recordings which revealed recitations of Shakespeare, numbers and other familiar lines had been packed away and deemed obsolete at the Smithsonian Institution for more than a century. But new technology has allowed them to be recovered and played.