WASHINGTON: The nation’s capital was the undisputed recording capital of the ‘80s. The 1880s, that is.

That’s when Alexander Graham Bell, having invented the first practical telephone, and inheriting hundreds of patent challenges in the process, set up shop in Washington to be closer to the patent offices and the Smithsonian Institution, which helped him establish his Volta Laboratory. It was there that he made hundreds of the earliest sound recordings.

Thomas Edison had already invented the phonograph, but Bell, trying to improve recorded sound, used wax, instead of Edison’s fragile tinfoil, and flat discs with spiral grooves, instead of cylindrical forms.

Bell donated his inventions to the Smithsonian in sealed boxes in part to secure his patents well before the turn of the 20th century, and in 1937, his descendants opened them, to some fanfare. A couple of years ago, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California discovered a way to optically read Bell’s recordings’ grooves and broadcast for the first time the inventor’s voice, recorded nearly 130 years ago.

SCOTTISH-born scientist and inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922).— Smithsonian Institution

Bell donated his inventions to the Smithsonian in sealed boxes in part to secure his patents well before the turn of the 20th century, and in 1937, his descendants opened them, to some fanfare. Visitors can now hear that recording, among others, at a kiosk — jukebox style — in a new exhibition at the National Museum of American History titled Hear My Voice: Alexander Graham Bell and the Origins of Recorded Sound, which also features equipment, documents and lab notes from his Volta lab. Here are the kiosk’s greatest hits:

No. 1

Bell declares what would become the title of the exhibition — “Hear my voice!” — after enunciating his name; the date, April 15, 1885 (20 years to the day after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination); and the address of his lab — 1221 Connecticut Ave. NW (present home to Lucky Bar).

No. 2

From that same wax-on-binders-board disc, a long list of numbers is read for more than four minutes, followed by the above declaration. (Think of this as the extended mix.)

No. 3

“To be or not to be” begins the brief quotation from Hamlet recorded on a brass disc with green wax. The recording, believed to have been made in 1885, is from an original master made Dec 29, 1881. It finishes, appropriately, with the words “to die, to sleep”.

No. 4

This was the nursery rhyme Edison recorded on his phonograph, so Bell tried it as well, reading “Mary Had a Little Lamb” complete with blooper and a sound of disappointment: “Oh, no.” Captured March 11, 1885, on a glass disc with photographic emulsion.

No. 5

A recording from 1885, on a cardboard disc with layers of plaster and foil, declares, “I am a magnetical Graphophone” and asks, “What are you?”

No. 6

The most reductive recording in the exhibition is of someone saying merely, “bar-o-me-tre”, lolling on every syllable, over and over. It was recorded Nov 17, 1885, on a glass disc with photographic emulsion. (Let the remixes begin.)

No. 7

A wax-coated Graphophone cylinder recording made in September 1881 begins with a strange trilling sound and another Hamlet quote, this time read by Bell’s father, Alexander Melville Bell: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

No. 8

The only musical offering among the recordings here, on a binders-board disc coated with wax, is an unnamed cornet quartet playing the tunes ‘Killarney’ and ‘Hot-Shot March’.

No. 9

The line that ends the 1881 Grapho­phone cylinder recording above turns out to be a joke: “I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph.”

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, February 10th, 2015

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