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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.
You need the Flash 10.2 beta which accelerates pallophotophone files.
Weren't we talking about this in the chatroulette story a few days ago?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
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...