ralph124c: Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959, and there are many sound recordings of his speeches and radio interviews, even television programs with him. From the catalog of the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives:
I was very surprised to hear his voice from a lecture he gave — I expected some declamatory voice full of 19th century humbug, but he actually sounded very Midwestern and unaffected.
The Museum of Broadcast Communications, in Chicago, has a copy of the 1953 NBC television program A Conversation With Frank Lloyd Wright.
Movie star Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, during the silent era. But he did record two songs in 1923, Kashmiri Love Song and El Relicario, both of which can be heard on the 100 Years of Cinema CD.
This site suggests that both vocal and video recordings of Tesla were made, but that the Tesla Society considers them all to be “missing”.
At least two gramophone recordings of a 1924 speech by Sun Yat-sen are in the possession of a collector. The Chinese leader had a “sonorous but kind” voice. The authenticity of these documents has been questioned, but not disproven.
In the BBC link, they mention rumored recordings of Abraham Lincoln. Who died in 1865.
WTF?
My understanding is that sound recording was invented in 1877 (at least, by Edison).
Has anyone heard anything more about these purported Lincoln recordings? And/or how they could have been created before 1877?
Are advocates claiming there was another technology, by a forgotten inventor? Or what?
Sloppy writer, sloppy fact checker. It just made me laugh. Yes, the lost Lincoln recordings are right next to the lost Lincoln newsreel footage.
There are recordings of the last Tsar, Nicholas II on clay disks and possible some other audio snippets, and from what I have heard, historians are trying their hardest to get them digitized and available.
The destruction of Queen Victoria’s audio recordings is one that kills me-she’s said to have had a beautiful voice.
There are some clips here: http://cslewis.drzeus.net/multimedia/audio.html
I wouldn’t call this booming. However, he probably spoke more quietly for the recordings.
This is a very good site to find many voice recordings. It’s the big version of the site of the President’s voices cited by Walloon.
http://vvl.lib.msu.edu/index.cfm
ralph124c There are several recording of Frank Lloyd Wright including one with Hugh Downs. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like they are available on-line. But if you happen to be in East Lansing MI, you could stop by the library at Michigan State University and give them a listen.
The coolest thing about the voice library was that when I was an undergrad, I could use them as sources. Hearing Oppenheimer talk sure beats reading about it.
There was actually a discussion of this before, in the improbably titled, SWEET JABBERING JESUS ON SPEED! The BBC has an imbecile on staff!. Somewhat unlikely, yes, but not so much as you might think.
In 1857 an inventor named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville patented a device he called the “phonoautograph.” This device recorded sound waves as lines on paper. He didn’t invent a playback mechanism. There are rumors that Lincoln’s voice was recorded on a phonoautograph, but no one has ever found such a recording. If the recording were found it could be played back optically using the technology described in the BBC article.
You can read about the phonoautograph here. You can read more about the optical playback technology developed at Lawrence Berkeley Labs here.
Carl Haber, one of the two LBL scientists who developed the optical playback system, is giving a public lecture at Berkeley High School on February 16. You can read about it here.
There is at least one recording of Schrodinger that survives, made in London for the BBC in May 1949. This was a talk on “Can Electrons Think?”, as part of a series called “Frontiers of Science”. Walter Moore, his biographer, describes his impression of it as follows:
A recording was also made of him delivering the same talk in German.
At somepoint, someone posted a link on the Boards to a site where a guy claimed to have written software which would allow you to lay an LP on an ordinary scanner, scan the album, and then listen to the album on your PC. You could download the software for free on his site. I never tried it, so I don’t know if it worked or not, but the mention of the phonoautograph reminded me of it.
I remember that! The Wired story is here, and includes a link to the inventor’s site.
Kaiser Bill was interviewed for a U.S. radio broadcast, in English, about 1941.
According to the review for this videocassette, it contains a clip of a TV interview with FLW.
I’m surprised that so far no one has mentioned Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans trumpeter who was one of the first jazz musicians. There are rumors that he once made a cylinder, but no such recording has ever been found.
Shhhh! It’s supposed to be a secret!