At the Edison Museum, the Archéophone restores the voices of Otto von Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke
Summary:
The publication of very old sound archives has multiplied in recent years, using various reproduction techniques. The recent restoration of Bismarck's voice
was made possible thanks to the Archéophone, a French invention that has been allowing the rediscovery of sounds from thousands of other wax cylinders for many years. The
recent enthusiasm in research for these sounds from the past can be explained by their symbolic value: they represent the first witnesses of our era, the era of information.
The multiplication of museum projects around the world is a direct consequence of this awareness, and a sound museum is set to open in Paris in the near future.
• The oldest recorded voices finally restored
Through three digitization campaigns, there has been a recent explosion of discoveries in the world of archives housing the oldest recorded sounds, continuing across the
Atlantic. After the spectacular sound restoration (2008-2009) of phonautograms recorded from 1857 to 1860 by the Frenchman Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, and after
the restoration of experimental recordings engraved on discs from 1881 to 1885 at the Volta Laboratory and preserved at the Smithsonian Institution (December 2011), the
announcement in late January 2012 of brand-new transfers of some cylinders recorded by an envoy of Edison in Europe in 1889.
These recordings notably reveal the voices of Bismarck and Moltke, and their sound restoration was made possible through a French invention, the Archéophone, a universal
phonographic cylinder reader. In October 1889, Theodor Edward Wangemann
recorded at Friedrichsruh the voices of Otto von Bismarck and
Helmuth von Moltke, then aged 74 and 89, respectively.
These cylinders, long forgotten in the vast halls of Edison's laboratories, now the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey, were found, played, and digitized.
Their audio content can be heard on the West Orange site
and also on the New York Times site.
These three campaigns to digitize venerable sounds were supervised by American teams. The first two were led by Patrick Feaster and the First Sounds team, and the third by
Jerry Fabris, curator at the West Orange Museum, who, after reading the cylinders with the Archéophone, relied on the expertise of two historians of sound recording:
Patrick Feaster (Indiana University - First Sounds) and Stephan Puille (Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin).
• Technical means employed to restore the oldest sounds
While the sounds from Scott de Martinville's phonautograms and those from the Volta Laboratory discs had to be rendered using advanced technical means, the voices on
Moltke and Bismarck's cylinders were restored using a French invention, the Archéophone, which is a simple analog reader used by the
world's largest sound archives. While optical techniques, involving scanners and computers, are perfectly suited to flat documents bearing a constant-depth engraving,
they cannot yet be applied to the playback of cylinders, especially because their engraving is in-depth, like "roller coasters". Consequently, analog readers for cylinders
like the Archéophone remain the most appropriate method for sound restoration from cylinder recordings, despite numerous unsuccessful attempts with laser playback methods to date.
• Growing Interest in Research and the Creation of New Sound Museums
The multiplication of these more or less sensational discoveries is not only due to the recent mastery of advanced technologies, but more certainly to a growing interest
from historical research in a subject that deeply touches our daily lives. These sound recordings are indeed the first witnesses of the dawn of the information age, brought
about by the emergence of new communication technologies. These technologies were developed by inventors who fought to patent and validate their research into mastering
the reproducibility of signals. These inventions, named telegraph, telephone, phonograph, cinema, radio, have shaped our world.
• Creation of New Sound Museums
The proliferation of museum projects that stage this technical, industrial, and social history is therefore both normal and expected:
∙ Musée des Ondes Emile Berliner, in Montreal : https://moeb.ca/en/ - This museum,
based on the historical site of the factory established by the father of the record industry, is expanding.
∙ EMI Group Archive trust : https://www.emiarchivetrust.org/ - This organization
houses one of the largest collections of recordings from the period 1877-1946 and aims to promote research on the history of sound recording, from technical, artistic,
and industrial perspectives.
∙ Musée du son enregistré, a project led by the association Phonoplanète, la grande aventure du son enregistré,
and supported by the City of Paris. This project, which will house in Paris 9th the private collection of the Phonogalerie - www.phonogalerie.com -
a unique collection in Europe in terms of quality, brings together the most beautiful sound machines as well as numerous related documents: records, cylinders, posters, library.
Henri Chamoux, expert for the Heritage and Architecture Directorate.
