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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.
Here's the video of the people, machine, and recording
http://www.timesunion.com/multimedia/video/TUvideo.asp?title=Preserving+history&vidid=96943677001&bccapt=Freeing+Thomas+Edison's+voice.+(Paul+Grondahl+%2F+Times+Union)
This is neither the only recording of the broadcast, nor the best. A recording of the broadcast made by Edison's own technicians on his then-state-of-the-art 30 RPM radio transcription system was restored by Professor Mike Biel and released by Mark 56 Records three decades ago.
http://www.gereports.com/edison-speaks-cracking-the-pallophotophone-code/
Finally, the full audio. Really exciting to think of all the audio they can save this way, and bring forward for more permanent storage.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Patent rights only last 20 years from filing. Copyright however, is much longer. Don't get your IP protections schemes all tied in a bunch!
Law firm representing NBC has filed suit alleging their client's copyrights have been violated for unauthorized rebroadcasting of the film content. "The audio programs recorded on those films are wholly owned intellectual properties belonging to our client, and their unauthorized rebroadcasting over the web is a willful theft of our client's intellectual properties. We fully intend to pursue this matter for the maximum payou... punitive damage under our law... ahm, the law."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Song of the South was released commercially in the UK on PAL VHS. So by brave souls do you mean "the people who bought it when it was commercially released on home video who happen to not be American?"
A more informative video can be found here with one of the engineers describing its function while it plays back some old recordings.
Old file formats are a problem for individuals too. I booted up an old computer and copied some old stories and papers I had written which were in Multimate or ProPrint format. I was lucky enough to be able to recover the text of one of them, but some of the others might take a lot more effort. If these were in OpenDocument format, I'd be able to decompress them and pull the XML-text (worst case scenario). Since they are long-forgotten proprietary formats, though, I'm forced to piece together what text I can see and hope that the gobbledygook is just formatting information being lost. (Of course, if someone knows how to import Multimate or Proprint into OpenOffice.org, I'd love to hear it.)
I believe that Multimate was one of the filters supported by StarOffice 5.2. You should still be able to find a version of it as Sun offered it for free (as in beer). You can then save it as a star office format file which openoffice can read in directly.
This is how I was able to bring in my wife's Masters Thesis which was written in Word Star.
The mods here need to read history. Perhaps I can say something sympathetic to the flat-earthers to get modded up?
Perhaps something kind to the 9-11 truthers. Wow Slashdot, you've gone crazy yo.