Edison speaks! Cracking the pallophotophone code

[Lithos]

http://www.gereports.com/edison-speaks-cracking-the-pallophotophone-code/

It’s the stuff of a flea market find, or a hidden treasure in the attic. A pile of dusty film canisters in the basement of the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium has yielded some of the world’s oldest surviving radio broadcasts. The 20 shows were first heard on Schenectady radio station WGY between 1929 and 1931. One features a talk by GE founder Thomas Edison in a broadcast celebrating the 50th anniversary of the incandescent light bulb. Another is a portion of a high school basketball game that’s believed to be the second oldest surviving sports broadcast. They were recorded on a long forgotten machine that GE developed in 1922 called a pallophotophone — after the Greek words for “shaking light sound” — in one of the earliest attempts to record sound on film. But there was only one catch with the great find: There weren’t any known pallophotophones in existence to play back the lost pieces of history. Enter the museum’s curator, Chris Hunter, and GE’s engineers, who together cracked the pallophotophone code.


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[grasswire]

1. fascinating!

thanks for posting

[Extend a Hand]

2. The recording sounds

amazingly clear! What an interesting article.

[Chulanowa]

4. You can rig up speakers to emit sound through plasma

The fidelity is amazing

There's the fact that if you touch them, you'll fucking DIE, too, but they sound great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEeWtBAE5LY

[Ultraviolet Cat]

3. Amazing!

I hope they make all of the recordings available to the public some day! It was incredible to hear Edison's voice so clearly in this recording.

I noticed that the Edison radio broadcast was recorded just three days before Black Thursday -- just an interesting historical coincidence.

Thanks for posting this!

[krispos42]

5. Wow, that is very cool indeed.

I imagine they'll being doing this in the far future with our CDs and such...

K&R

[Ian David]

6. Remember the guy who dropped an Edison cylinder on The Today Show or something? n/t

[TheMadMonk]

7. And from a briliant if overly complex invention to the utterly banal.

In the sidebar a video entitled "Sledghammer Blues" http://www.ge.com/audio_video/ge/products_services/brains_over_brawn.html

OMG GE has almost invented the trip hammer.

If this is what passes for high inovation in the US today then all I can offer by way of advice is get the fuck out of the country NOW!