The oldest known record re-created from a single printed photograph

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The oldest known record re-created from a single printed photograph

Patrick Feaster, a sound historian at Indiana University specializes in bringing really old audio recordings back to life. His latest feat was bringing back an audio recording from around 1889 recorded by Emile Berliner. The record no longer exists, but Feaster was able to reconstruct the record using nothing but an old photograph of the record from 1890.

Feaster found the photo of the album by chance, in a German magazine from 1890 stored at Bloomington’s Herman B Wells Library:

I was looking for a picture of the oldest known recording studio, to illustrate a discussion I was giving on my work with Thomas Edison’s recordings. I pulled it off the shelf and, while I had it open, I looked at the index and saw there was an article on the gramophone. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a bonus. So I flipped through and, lo and behold, there’s a paper print of the actual recording.

What he heard left him speechless: it was the voice of the father of the gramophone, Emile Berliner, reciting Friedrich Schiller’s ballad Der Handschuh:

Vor seinem Löwengarten
Das Kampfspiel zu erwarten
Saß König Franz
Und um ihn die Großen der Krone
Und rings auf hohem Balkone
Die Damen in schönem Kranz

Feaster has used this technique three times before. One of them was a test recording by Berliner, made in Hanover in 1889. And in that recording, Berliner talks with someone called Louis Rosenthal. According to Feaster, Rosenthal was helping Berliner, experimenting with photographic duplication:

In that recording, Berliner tells us he’s making a record for Rosenthal to experiment with. He shares that they’re in this particular building in Hanover, and then he recites some poetry, sings a song and counts to 20 in several languages.

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