[78-L] Humanity's First Recordings of its Own Voice - Historian David Giovannoni this Saturday

[Gerald_Fabris at nps.gov]

Thomas Edison NHP News Release

Contact: Karen Sloat-Olsen
Phone: 973-736-0550 x17
Reservations:  973-736-0550 x89

Humanity's First Recordings of its Own Voice
Historian David Giovannoni Presentation

WEST ORANGE, NJ - On Saturday evening, November 6, 2010, at 7:00 pm, Thomas
Edison National Historical Park welcomes historian David Giovannoni who
will give a 75-minute illustrated presentation titled “Humanity’s First
Recordings of its Own Voice.”  The program will be held at the Laboratory
Complex at 211 Main Street. Admission to the program is free.  Seating is
limited and reservations are required. Reservations can be made by calling
973-736-0550, ext.89.

Thomas Edison’s tinfoil phonograph of 1877 is rightly considered one of the
marvels of the nineteenth century.  But in mid-nineteenth-century France,
amateur inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville conceived of a rather
similar machine.  Between 1854 and 1860 he experimented with focusing
airborne sounds of speech and music onto paper.  His phonautograph bore a
striking resemblance to Edison’s phonograph of 20 years later.  But his
recordings, unlike Edison’s, were meant to be read by the eye, not heard by
the ear.

For a century-and-a-half his experiments lay quietly in the venerable
French archives in which he deposited them.  Then in 2007 a few audio
historians hypothesized there was a real possibility that modern technology
could develop these experimental recordings like dormant photographic
plates.  Instead of exposing images, however, these would bear sounds –
perhaps even humanity’s first recordings of its own voice!

In this presentation David Giovannoni recounts how he and his colleagues
have identified dozens of these forgotten documents and coaxed several to
talk and to sing.  A principal in their discovery and recovery, Giovannoni
is the first person since Scott de Martinville to personally examine every
recording.  He’ll explain how they were made and how they are played.
He’ll discuss Scott de Martinville experiments, his reception in
established scientific circles, and his early descent into an unmarked
grave.

For more information or directions please call 973-736-0550 ext. 11 or
visit our website at www.nps.gov/edis.

-NPS-

National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior     Thomas Edison
National Historical Park
211 Main Street
West Orange, NJ 07052