Until about ten years ago, nobody knew what Alexander Graham Bell sounded like. But a breakthrough came in 2013, when Smithsonian researchers recovered a previously “unplayable” recording of the scientist on a wax-and-cardboard disc.
“Hear my voice,” Bell declared. For the first time since his death in 1922, the world could finally listen to his words.
Now, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has announced a new project: restoring hundreds of never-before-heard sound recordings made by Bell and his fellow researchers between 1881 and 1892 at Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and Bell’s property in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. They are some of the world’s earliest sound recordings.
“Over the three-year duration of this remarkable project, ‘Hearing History: Recovering Sound from Alexander Graham Bell’s Experimental Records,’ we will preserve and make accessible for the first time about 300 recordings that have been in the museum’s collections for over a century, unheard by anyone,” says Anthea M. Hartig, the museum’s Elizabeth MacMillan director, in a statement. The new initiative will begin in the fall.