We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now
Smithsonian researchers used optical technology to play back the unplayable records
- By Charlotte Gray
- Smithsonian magazine, May 2013, Subscribe
During the years I spent in the company of Alexander Graham Bell, at work on his biography, I often wondered what the inventor of the world’s most important acoustical device—the telephone—might have sounded like.
Born in Scotland in 1847, Bell, at different periods of his life, lived in England, then Canada and, later, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. His favorite refuge was Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where he spent the summers from the mid-1880s on. In his day, 85 percent of the population there conversed in Gaelic. Did Bell speak with a Scottish burr? What was the pitch and depth of the voice with which he loved to belt out ballads and music hall songs?
Someone who knew that voice was his granddaughter, Mabel Grosvenor, a noted Washington, D.C. pediatrician who retired in 1966. In 2004, I met with Dr. Mabel, as she was known in the family, when she was 99 years old—clearheaded, dignified and a bit fierce. I inquired whether her grandfather had an accent. “He sounded,” she said firmly, “like you.” As a British-born immigrant to Canada, my accent is BBC English with a Canadian overlay: It made instant sense to me that I would share intonations and pronunciations with a man raised in Edinburgh who had resided in North America from the age of 23. When Dr. Mabel died in 2006, the last direct link with the inventor was gone.
Today, however, a dramatic application of digital technology has allowed researchers to recover Bell’s voice from a recording held by the Smithsonian—a breakthrough announced here for the first time. From the 1880s on, until his death in 1922, Bell gave an extensive collection of laboratory materials to the Smithsonian Institution, where he was a member of the Board of Regents. The donation included more than 400 discs and cylinders Bell used as he tried his hand at recording sound. The holdings also documented Bell’s research, should patent disputes arise similar to the protracted legal wrangling that attended the invention of the telephone.
Bell conducted his sound experiments between 1880 and 1886, collaborating with his cousin Chichester Bell and technician Charles Sumner Tainter. They worked at Bell’s Volta Laboratory, at 1221 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, originally established inside what had been a stable. In 1877, his great rival, Thomas Edison, had recorded sound on embossed foil; Bell was eager to improve the process. Some of Bell’s research on light and sound during this period anticipated fiber-optic communications.
Inside the lab, Bell and his associates bent over their pioneering audio apparatus, testing the potential of a variety of materials, including metal, wax, glass, paper, plaster, foil and cardboard, for recording sound, and then listening to what they had embedded on discs or cylinders. However, the precise methods they employed in early efforts to play back their recordings are lost to history.
As a result, says curator Carlene Stephens of the National Museum of American History, the discs, ranging from 4 to 14 inches in diameter, remained “mute artifacts.” She began to wonder, she adds, “if we would ever know what was on them.”
Then, Stephens learned that physicist Carl Haber at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, had succeeded in extracting sound from early recordings made in Paris in 1860. He and his team created high-resolution optical scans converted by computer into an audio file.
Stephens contacted Haber. Early in 2011, Haber, his colleague physicist Earl Cornell and Peter Alyea, a digital conversion specialist at the Library of Congress, began analyzing the Volta Lab discs, unlocking sound inaccessible for more than a century. Muffled voices could be detected reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy, sequences of numbers and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
In autumn 2011, Patrick Feaster, an Indiana University sound-media historian, aided by Stephens, compiled an exhaustive inventory of notations on the discs and cylinders—many scratched on wax and all but illegible. Their scholarly detective work led to a tantalizing discovery. Documents indicated that one wax-and-cardboard disc, from April 15, 1885—a date now deciphered from a wax inscription—contained a recording of Bell speaking.
On June 20, 2012, at the Library of Congress, a team including Haber, Stephens and Alyea was transfixed as it listened to the inventor himself : “In witness whereof—hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.”
In that ringing declaration, I heard the clear diction of a man whose father, Alexander Melville Bell, had been a renowned elocution teacher (and perhaps the model for the imperious Prof. Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw acknowledged Bell in his preface to the play).
I heard, too, the deliberate enunciation of a devoted husband whose deaf wife, Mabel, was dependent on lip reading. And true to his granddaughter’s word, the intonation of the British Isles was unmistakable in Bell’s speech. The voice is vigorous and forthright—as was the inventor, at last speaking to us across the years.
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Comments (63)
reminds me of the "Talking Pictures" scene in "Singing in the Rain" movie...
Posted by nancy cassidy on May 9,2013 | 12:44 AM
I've listened to this many times, and I can't understand the word following "...hear my...." It has a hard ending, like a b or a p, or even a d. I can't imagine it being "voice", especially when he is taking such care to enunciate. His name is very clear and distinct. "Hear" is pronounced with two syllables, which makes me think he could be saying something else. "My" is very distinct also, but it doesn't seem to me that the next word could possibly be "voice". Was his father alive at the time of the recording? Sometimes I think the voice is saying, "Hear my boy: Alexander Graham Bell." Of course, this file does not have the first part, the "In witness whereof...."
Posted by Terry Mulcahy on May 7,2013 | 12:11 PM
Wow. That played loud and clear for me. Good find.
Posted by Pam on May 2,2013 | 04:15 PM
Sirs: if you have in fact heard these records, kindly post an mp3. I had a program almost ten years ago to convert analogue sound to wav, wma or mp3. Thanks
Posted by Bruce Campbell on May 1,2013 | 06:49 PM
What a great discovery!!!! Hope you can make a clearer copy so we can decide just what Dr Bell DID say.. I too think he said "hear my voice" and his name.. But then he had probably had to say the same thing over and over again until they could get a good copy. Much as he did when testing out the instrument which Watson finally did hear the first time over a wire.. Nevertheless it was a great thrill to hear Bell's voice for the first time ever..Thank you Smithsonian Museum.
Posted by Helene Pancoast on May 1,2013 | 11:45 AM
I agree with many of the comments posted here; the audio is barely listenable. I tried posting a link to a "cleaned up" version of the audio, but my comment was never approved. If you want to hear the cleaned up version, search go to sound cloud dot com forwardslash scotttroyer forwardslash alexander-graham-bell
Posted by Scott Troyer on April 30,2013 | 05:15 PM
You should take a look at The New York Times of October 28, 1937. The headline is "Original Wax Voice Record, Made by Bell, Is Heard at Smithsonian After 56 Years."
Posted by Mark Schubin on April 30,2013 | 03:54 PM
And the audio does play! :)
Posted by Peter C on April 30,2013 | 05:01 AM
He really didn't invented the telephone. Antonio Meucci did. Even the Congress recognized this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Meucci
Posted by Peter C on April 30,2013 | 05:01 AM
The fact that the audio won't play is probably more a problem with your internet plug-ins than the author and this website. Try to update everything you have.
Posted by Emory Paine on April 29,2013 | 03:44 PM
I hear this loud and clear, what are people moaning about? I'd help out on the plug in, but don't know what is needed, it's just an MP3 file, I'm using google chrome.
Posted by Tristan Sharp on April 29,2013 | 03:33 PM
Found it. Sorry.
Posted by Mike Makynen on April 29,2013 | 12:33 PM
Just curious. Why don't you let us hear the recording? Or is there a way to do it, and I just missed it. Mike
Posted by Mike Makynen on April 29,2013 | 12:31 PM
The article about Alexander Graham Bell was exciting. How amazing to hear his voice! My family and I have been friends with many Deaf students and adults through the years and I appreciate all AGB did for his Deaf wife and others as he brought more possibilities for sound to the world. I pray we will use this gift for God's glory and not our own. It is a gift from eternity past, present and future. When in Washington I always go by the Smithsonian to step back in to history and appreciate what I can learn from the past...always have to visit the Museum of Natural History...love the elephant. Blessings, Carolyn Proverbs 3:5,6
Posted by Carolyn O. McCormick on April 29,2013 | 11:28 AM
The Audio of Bell will not Play
Posted by Gerald Bensink on April 28,2013 | 08:04 PM
Disappointing. I thought Mr. Bell's message would be played here. I am Scottish - and deaf. With the help of my cochlear implant I would probably have been able to hear Mr. Bell. Surprised he no longer sounded distinctly Scottish - but British - whatever that sounds like!
Posted by Moira Eicholtz on April 28,2013 | 07:21 PM
Thank you for all this fine work that you are doing. I tried to hear Bell, clicking on the link on the page. No sound appeared. I got an error message saying that more plugins were needed. Can you help me out? I am running Windows 7 on an HP laptop. Thank you for any suggestions.
Posted by David Brillinger on April 28,2013 | 05:15 PM
I find it remarkable that the "wax-and-cardboard disc" in the photo appears to have the same proportions as a CD or DVD. I'm looking forward to the consumer version of the "virtual stylus."
Posted by Michael on April 28,2013 | 03:34 PM
. It is strange ! . We have been able to document a great deal about music quite well for hundreds of years via human-readable symbology. . However, when it comes to voices and faces we stumble about virtually helplessly without a photo or recording. . I cannot help but feel that the human face and voice can be described by reference to a combinatorial field of standard references. . Has anything of the sort been attempted ? -- That is, beyond the Identikit ? .
Posted by Allen N Wollscheidt on April 28,2013 | 01:47 PM
I'm assuming that the blank below “In witness whereof—hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.” is where the missing plug-in is supposed to be to play the recording.
Posted by Jay on April 28,2013 | 12:35 PM
So why isn't there a link to the digital version of the recording so we can all hear it?
Posted by Ira Cotton on April 28,2013 | 12:13 PM
Sounds like "Alexander Liam Bell"???
Posted by Linda D on April 28,2013 | 12:12 PM
He sounds like Prof. Kingsfield from "The Paper Chase". "Mister Hart, here is a dime. Take it, call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you ever becoming a lawyer."
Posted by Randy Stevens on April 28,2013 | 12:04 PM
This is great! The video is great as well, but, in future videos, it would be great if you could focus the camera in on the software used so those of us, who are sound enthusiasts could see what audio software is being used. Maybe a Smithsonian special on sound design and audio editing? Thanks, Scott G./ AbstractCats
Posted by ScottAC on April 27,2013 | 05:20 PM
I remember playing a square wax and cardboard record on an old wind up grandma phone as a child. To hear the voice of A G Bell 128 years later using the technology described is absolutely astonishing. But, perhaps no more astonishing than what Bell accomplished in his day.
Posted by Blair Donkin on April 27,2013 | 07:56 AM
Well, I feel silly. Disregard my earlier comment. It seems there's something malfunctioning in my computer's audio hardware, and anything I try to play from any source is coming through highly distorted.
Posted by Andy on April 26,2013 | 02:49 PM
It seems like the author of this piece didn't even listen to the recording. First of all, there are only nine syllables in the recording -- nowhere near enough for it to contain the phrase "In witness whereof, hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell," which has fourteen syllables. Secondly, the recording is barely recognizable as a human voice due to distortion. But the author describes it as a "ringing declaration" with "clear diction." This is not clear diction by any stretch of the imagination. Thirdly, the author says that a British accent was "unmistakable" in the recording. I cannot believe that any "accent" could be discerned from a recording where you cannot hear what phonemes are being uttered in the first place. Either the author of this article was listening to some completely different copy than the embedded audio file, or she is just making stuff up out of thin air.
Posted by Andy on April 26,2013 | 12:54 PM
The supplied snippet of recorded quote is not “In witness whereof—hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.” but is actually “Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.”
Posted by Bernie Deitrick on April 26,2013 | 11:57 AM
Dear Gentlemen. I get to this page from the Scout Report. It is not possible to find out where to hear the voice of Graham Bell. In the middle of the article there is a "connector missing" indication. I am using a 7" tablet with Android. Regards Cristian
Posted by Cristian Lodtmann on April 26,2013 | 10:44 AM
Overwhelmed by the voice that has spoken through time.
Posted by Mba on April 26,2013 | 04:41 AM
This is wonderful. Thank you!
Posted by Ruthie on April 25,2013 | 02:46 AM
There is no "In witness whereof" on this recording! It begins with "Hear my voice..."
Posted by Robert B. Matthews on April 25,2013 | 02:38 AM
Ironically, after unlocking Bell's voice from some obscure proprietary format after all these years, The Smithsonian has chosen to reveal Bell's voice using MP3, a proprietary audio format. How about a version in Ogg Vorbis a la Wikipedia? Don't lock things up again!
Posted by Sameer Verma on April 25,2013 | 01:33 AM
I think this is wonderful to be able to recover lost voice and music data. Most of us thought it was lost forever. It shows that persistence and patience combined with ingenuity has tremendous power in science. We tend to underestimate intelligence by self motivated people and lose by turning science over to bureaucracy.
Posted by James C. Langford on April 25,2013 | 12:27 AM
to david: no
Posted by john on April 25,2013 | 08:20 PM
That is awesome!!
Posted by Lea on April 25,2013 | 07:07 PM
Just for the record, Bell did not invent the telephone, but Antonio Meucci did. It's very very likely he stole the design when he had access to a lab where Meucci had sent a prototype. Meucci was totally unsuccesful in selling his device, Bell did much better there. So Bell changed the world and Meucci didn't, but that doesn't change the fact who invented it. Source: Mike Green, "The nearly men. A chronicle of scientific failure" (Chalford 2007).
Posted by Spiny Norman on April 25,2013 | 06:37 PM
wonderful! is like traveling to the past across his voice! love it
Posted by on April 25,2013 | 06:16 PM
I went to college with and was a good friend of Mr. Bell's granddaughter. How amazing for her and her family to get to hear his voice!!
Posted by Sally Ourieff on April 25,2013 | 05:43 PM
Wonderful simply wonderful. Like he is telling the future generations... Hear my voice, this is Alexander Graham Bell the Great! Can not express the emotions in words, hats off to those genius who brought his voice to us.
Posted by Shrikant Gundapwar on April 25,2013 | 05:21 PM
It sounds like he's saying, "Pure veritas... Alexander Graham Bell.” Pure truth/reality would make sense because it's a recording and not something unverifiable that's written down.
Posted by Matthias Schmitz on April 25,2013 | 04:03 PM
>> We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. >> Until Now And we still don't know. Or at least some of us still don't. Why? Because the Smithsonian used some sort of proprietary audio format for the recording playback, and those of us who do not have the necessary decoder cannot listen to Mr. Bell's voice. For crying out loud! Why not just make it an MP3 file so that anyone can listen to it?? Jeff Barry Acton, MA
Posted by Jeff Barry on April 25,2013 | 03:52 PM
OK, this is very interesting, but I cannot understand what he says, even after listening to it several times. Does anybody know what he says?
Posted by Don on April 25,2013 | 03:22 PM
How do we know they're playing back the recording at the correct rate? That would affect the pitch of his voice. Were there instructions on the cylinder for playback speed?
Posted by will on April 25,2013 | 02:46 PM
I had a hard time hearing AGB's voice clearly, so I tried cleaning up the audio a bit. To listen to what I came up with, check out the streaming audio on SoundCloud. http://soundcloud.com/scotttroyer/alexander-graham-bell
Posted by Scott Troyer on April 25,2013 | 01:42 PM
This disc looks remarkably like a CD of today.
Posted by joe dubs on April 25,2013 | 01:23 PM
Most people are not aware that Bell also had a hand in early aviation, encouraging Glenn Curtis, and inventing the aileron.
Posted by Brad Jensen on April 25,2013 | 12:48 PM
That was so cool hearing Mr. Bell's voice.
Posted by Trevorne Lewis on April 25,2013 | 11:07 AM
And some unscrupulous ignorant idiot decide to encode Alexander Graham Bell voice on qktime ...
Posted by gpl'ed on April 25,2013 | 10:02 AM
Please post more sound clips, especially the one at the end of the video!
Posted by Brad Spry on April 25,2013 | 07:35 AM
You chose Quicktime? Seriously? In an article about finding ways around difficult and unusable technology no less.. You've just made it impossible for half the devices and computers out there to listen to the recording. It remains mute.
Posted by Jim on April 24,2013 | 02:02 AM
Wasn't it Edison's voice on the piece "I Am The Gramophone"? which was an introduction to the new fangled device?
Posted by Chris O'Neil on April 24,2013 | 12:42 AM
Lets get our facts straight, Bell didn't invent the phone, it was Antonio Meucci. Period.
Posted by Claudio on April 24,2013 | 11:39 PM
>>quicktime plug in required my first and last visit to smithsonian
Posted by heath on April 24,2013 | 11:14 PM
I came here to listen to the voice of Alexander Graham Bell but was disappointed to discover that I was required to install Quicktime in order to listen to it. Even more so once I discovered that the audio file was a simple mp3 that can be played by every bit of audio software out there. Did Apple pay you for Quicktime exclusivity? If not, perhaps you should allow more options for multimedia on your website.
Posted by Simon Moon on April 24,2013 | 08:40 PM
Resurrecting these old recordings (including the sets from Paris, and others from Russia) is marvelous. I've heard a story that an inventor recorded Chopin's piano playing by tracing the sound vibrations on a soot-covered cylinder in the 1840's. Of course, he had no way of playing it. If that cylinder exists, the LBNL team ought to make it audible. Now THAT would be historic!
Posted by Peter Czipott on April 24,2013 | 08:05 PM
Any reason not to include the audio clip here for the rest of us?
Posted by Hillel on April 24,2013 | 07:09 PM
I am not sure how they got "In witness whereof, hear my voice" portion of out of that recording. I certainly don't hear that.
Posted by Russell Campbell on April 24,2013 | 06:03 PM
Long way to go for a bit of garble. Process is interesting, results not so much.
Posted by Peter Bannon on April 24,2013 | 05:58 PM
I wonder if this kinda technology could be used to hear what ancient Egyptians, or Greco Roman voices that spoke when they made pottery.
Posted by Aaron Johnson on April 24,2013 | 05:51 PM
I'm amazed that in the 40 years after this recording was made that Bell wasn't on record again. I've heard the recording of Watson describing the first phone call, made during an interview in later life. You'd think Bell, like Edison, would have made sure there were plenty of recordings of himself.
Posted by Gaylon Arnold on April 24,2013 | 05:50 PM
What a thrilling discovery!
Posted by The Sanity Inspector on April 24,2013 | 05:02 PM
I recently received a Kindle Fire as a gift and was excited to read the magazines I subscribe to on it. I first downloaded the National geographic app from Amazon which works nicely. When I went to find a similar app for Smithsonian I was disappointed to find you only offer the app for the Ipod or google play, which cannot be accessed by Kindle users. Since there is now a large base of Kindle users, I was wondering when you were planning to release an app for that tablet? thank you, David Lanfear
Posted by David Lanfear on April 23,2013 | 10:26 PM