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.

Comments

Old technology more lasting

[Gazoogleheimer]

In some ways, it is interesting to think that it is technically easier to recover data from this sort of recording (and likewise, other analog systems like magnetic reel-to-reel tape and records) long after the means to recover the data are lost compared to more modern, computerized formats. I sometimes worry about the 'lasting-ness' of all my JPEG photography compared to my film negatives through this same issue.

Re:Old technology more lasting

[phantomfive]

That is a silly worry. All you have to do is keep on top of it, and make sure you have a backup. You can change from tape to disk to usb key to whatever else comes along and not lose a single byte of data.

Analog data, including your film negatives, degrade over time, and can never be recovered. If people care about your stuff, it's much more likely to be around a hundred years from now in digital format than in analog format.

Re:Old technology more lasting

[smellsofbikes]

I sometimes worry about the 'lasting-ness' of all my JPEG photography compared to my film negatives through this same issue.

What you need is a distributed, persistent, peer-to-peer file system. Luckily, just such a thing can be built cheaply, using commodity hardware and software. Include a 19 year old woman who isn't wearing a shirt in each of your photographs, and you can be guaranteed that you will have 100% retention and worldwide availability of your photography hundreds of years into the future.

Scanner

[grahamsz]

Is there any reason you wouldn't just make a high resolution scan of the film and attempt to process it from there? Certainly I understand the satisfaction in making a physical machine, but doesn't that risk a lot more damage to the original media?

Re:Scanner

[slimjim8094]

My thoughts exactly. IIRC, for the old wax-cylinder recordings that wouldn't survive a playback, they used a laser "stylus" to measure the exact depth and variation of the grooves down to fractions of a mm, and were able to play it back no problem. They got a higher-quality sound off the drum then even the destructive stylus would've managed.

That's the thing about digital formats going obsolete - as long as the information can be represented as a series of bits on whatever the current computer is, anybody can build or recreate a software 'machine' to decode/convert them. And any guy with a computer can do that... it doesn't need the resources of a couple of engineers from GE.

Re:Scanner

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any reason you wouldn't just make a high resolution scan of the film and attempt to process it from there? Certainly I understand the satisfaction in making a physical machine, but doesn't that risk a lot more damage to the original media?

I used to live down the street from John Schneider (one of the engineers who worked on this). He's actually a multi-millionaire who started his own company a few years back and it's pretty cool that he's still getting his hands dirty with things like this.
Here's a bio.. http://www.spoke.com/info/pOzZMi/JohnSchneiter

Although he's a really smart guy, he's not really super computer savvy - as is common for a lot of MechEs so it makes sense that he would try to solve this problem using hardware since that's what he knows. Naturally myself (and likely most software guys) would get a high resolution scanner out and write some code to "playback" the stored audio. I've seen similar applications for playing old records that don't require actually touching the record with a needle. Regardless, you really only need to play it once and digitize the audio so the concern of multiple playbacks ruining the film isn't that big of a concern.

All in all a really cool hack!

Oct 21, 1929

[smitty97]

And a week later, the markets crashed.

Content still under copyright?

[linebackn]

1929? So the entirety of the content from those things would still be under copyright, right?

Eh, torrent link plz.

Zippity do dah gone forever!

[erroneus]

It is during instances and moments like these that we should be reminded of exactly how bad it is to protect content and patent data processing methods. These are the surest ways for us to lose the historical data we are creating today. Already, losses of great works have been lost due to lack of republication because copyright has not expired before the last copies were lost forever. If it were not for a few brave individuals, Disney's "Song of the South" would be lost forever today as they will never EVER publish it again and it is not available for sale anywhere.

And more and more, we are seeing technologies phasing out... floppy disks... anyone got an 8" floppy drive laying around? What about 5 1/4" No? I still have a few USB 3.5" floppy drives but that was only to make a floppy disk RAID for fun. We might find some paper tape somewhere in an archive out there in a dark closet, but will we find a reader for it?

The push for "open formats" is precisely about better guaranteeing that data will be available in the future and so few people are willing to listen or understand. "DOC" is the standard right?

Re:phallophotophone???

[Dishevel]

Were you holding your dick at the time. If so then yes that was Chatroulette you were on.

Re:Neither Only nor Best

[negRo_slim]

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.

So I guess there is no value in having a different format and a different physical object with which to gauge the recordings against one another? There is no value in the recreation of a long dead invention of a fabled inventor? Is there no value in restoring one more part of our ever fading past?