O Say Can You See?

Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice

Editor’s note: This blog is the second of a two-part series exploring the process of bringing early sound recordings to life for the first time in over a century.

There is always something new waiting to be discovered at the Smithsonian, whether it is an artifact, a recorded sound, or an overlooked story.

Over the past two years, Carl Haber and Earl Cornell of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Peter Alyea at the Library of Congress have partnered with the National Museum of American History to coax sound recordings dating to the 1880s into telling (and singing!) their stories. The recovered recordings are the Volta Laboratory Associates’ early experiments at recording and even reproducing live sound. These recordings were made in Washington, D.C., by Alexander Graham Bell, his cousin Chichester Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter. In some ways, the inventors anticipated the modern music industry. They experimented with reproduction and copying techniques for possible mass-consumption of their discs, and, unlike Edison’s phonograph cylinders, the Volta records were durable enough to be played multiple times.

Some of the Volta recordings were on wax mounted to pasteboard, a material similar to the covers of a hard-back book. Photo by Annie Dobberteen.

Over 130 years after the Volta group sealed some of these recordings in tin boxes and deposited them in a vault at the Smithsonian, the Volta objects in the museum’s Work and Industry collection have been given back their voice. On Tuesday, December 13, 2011, the recordings were played publicly for the first time.

The sound recovery project has inspired others to look more closely at the Volta collection. Lemelson Center Fellow Patrick Feaster has been examining the museum’s experimental recordings to prepare a discography.

Patrick Feaster examines and photographs the early sound collection for his discography project. Photo by Annie Dobberteen.

As Dr. Feaster worked with our collection of about 400 objects this fall, a handful of previously uncatalogued, virtually unknown Volta artifacts surfaced. About forty of these early recordings had stayed off the radar because they had never been assigned proper catalog numbers. This is highly unusual from a modern collections management point of view; today, new objects are almost immediately assigned unique numbers upon their entry into the collection. But for some reason, this had not happened to these discs. Though well taken care of, they had become a bit of a Smithsonian mystery. We’ve been able to listen to a few of the discs, but what else could they bring to light?

Early sound recordings have been stored at the Smithsonian for decades. Photo by Annie Dobberteen.

My task was to examine and number these records to finally give them an official home within the larger Smithsonian numbering system. I gently inspected discs made of everything from copper (now chipping due to age) to cardboard to fragmenting plaster. Some discs had bits of foil imbedded in the wax coating the pasteboard, and others had notes etched into them by Bell and his associates. I found other strange, square-shaped objects that turned out to be impressions of recordings intended to be used for mass-reproduction.

These early recording prototypes would be abandoned in the late 1880s in favor of Volta’s wax cylinders, which were used for dictation and stenographic office work as late as the 1930s. But physically interacting with the Volta inventors’ initial creative thought processes was a privilege, and I was fascinated with the idea that these delicate discs have so much to tell and are now getting the chance.

The discs in the collection were made using a variety of metals, paper, wax, and foil. Photo by Christine Klepper.

So far, the voices on these previously unplayable discs remain unidentified. The next step for the recordings will be to recover and analyze those formerly silent voices. As the project moves forward, it is likely that we will be able to clearly identify Alexander Graham Bell himself.

Hear the Volta Labs Recordings, 1880-1885

PART 1: Trilled R's and the dawn of recorded sound in America

Annie Dobberteen is an intern in the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History.

 

The Italian soul of Steve Jobs

As far as anybody knows, Steve Jobs did not have a drop of Italian blood, even by osmosis from his adoptive parents. Yet he clearly had a strong affinity for Italy. According to Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of the Apple genius, Jobs’s attendance at the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1981 was a seminal moment, a turning point in his career. The meeting that year was devoted to the Italian style and included, among other celebrities, designer Mario Bellini, filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, carmaker Sergio Pininfarina, and Fiat heiress Susanna Agnelli. As a result, “I had come to revere the Italian designers … and it was an amazing inspiration,” he told Isaacson. From the Italians, he imbibed the principles of simple functional design that came to define his technological style and accounted for much of his spectacular business success. When he returned to run Apple in 1997, it was no surprise that he sought out such top names in Italian design as legendary car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro and architect/designer Ettore Sottsass, famous for his work at the Olivetti Company, which we’ll hear more about in a moment.

Time and again, that sense of style proved to be his comparative advantage in the digital marketplace. The development of the iPod is a prime case in point. Although he always loved music, Jobs awoke almost too late to the business possibilities of marrying personal computers with recorded sound. Capitalizing on the digital music craze, HP and other computer companies started including CD burners in their machines so users could create their own digital music mix.

Other start-ups had already come up with portable music players using the MP3 format. Suddenly realizing all this, Jobs told Issacson, “I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.” And catch up he did, with iTunes, the iTunes Store, and the fantastically successful iPod, a miracle of simplicity and functionality. What made the difference between Apple’s iPod and every other portable music player was the pure white minimalist concept conceived by Apple’s design chief, Jonathan (Jony) Ive, who epitomized the same ethos of functional simplicity. As soon as he saw Ive’s prototype, Jobs knew that the look and feel of the Apple iPod were destined for success.

Since his death, Jobs has been compared to other great technological visionaries. Isaacson likens him to Thomas Edison, others to Edwin Land. But what did he have in common with all those Italian designers who had made such an impression on him? A comparable figure, to my mind, would be Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960), one of the most influential designers of the 20th century, in Italy or anywhere else, for that matter. Inheriting the business from his father Camillo in the 1930s, Adriano was president and guiding spirit of the Olivetti Company, famed for its elegant typewriters and business machines. A leader, like Jobs, in the high-tech manufacturing sector of his day, Adriano developed Olivetti into a hugely successful firm with global reach and reputation. In the 1950s, his company launched the mainframe Elea computer line and, in the 1980s, even a PC, the Olivetti M20, all stamped with the company’s signature style. (In a monumentally bad business decision, the company eventually shed its computer business.)

Central control unit of the mainframe Olivetti Elea 9003 (1957). Photo by we-make-money-not-art, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Olivetti and Jobs were soulmates beyond tracing similar arcs in the world of industry. Both made their marks at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Anyone who has ever owned an Olivetti Lettera typewriter will know why it is enshrined at the Museum of Modern Art. Not only did it work beautifully, it was gorgeous to behold.

Olivetti Lettera 22 (first model) typewriter. Photo by LjL, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

An enthusiastic modernist, Adriano considered his firm’s ambience to be as important as the products he created. Hiring Italy’s best modern architects in the 1930s and 1940s, he built model factories, stores, schools, and homes for his workers, even a model city (Robert Kargon and I wrote about this in Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century). In short, he viewed his business and his world as a work of art.

Adriano Olivetti in front of his factories in Ivrea, 1960. Courtesy Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti.

With his love of Italian design, Jobs was surely inspired by the Olivetti style in developing everything from the Mac to the iPhone and the iPad. Driven by a passion for technological beauty, both Olivetti and Jobs “collected” design geniuses in their companies; Apple’s Jony Ive had his counterpart in Olivetti’s Marcello Nizzoli. Jobs also shared the Italian’s passionate concern for architecture and ambience. Isaacson notes that Jobs, nothing short of obsessive about planning his Apple stores, insisted on covering the floors with the same gray-blue sandstone he had seen in Florence sidewalks during a 1985 trip to Italy. He imported Apple store stone directly from the same quarry, hiring Florentine designers to oversee the cutting and layout of the tiles.

Olivetti was an out-and-out utopian, Jobs perhaps a closet one. Despite often being, according to Isaacson, notoriously, meanly competitive and extremely demanding on his staff, he believed in perfecting the world through the power of technology and design. He and Olivetti avowedly cared less about money than how their innovations were improving society and culture. For both, design aesthetics was far more than window dressing; it was the soul of technology and the key to the future. Ill-designed technology was not only useless and unpleasant, it was alienating, oppressive, inhuman. Jobs and Olivetti believed that clean, simple, and honest design beautified, humanized, and ultimately redeemed our modern technological culture.

Art Molella is Director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History. This column originally appeared in Prototype, the Lemelson Center’s newsletter.

 

Trilled R's and the dawn of recorded sound in America

Editor’s note: This blog is the first part of a two-part series exploring the process of bringing early sound recordings to life for the first time in over a century.

Until recently, the oldest recorded sounds of known date which anyone could hear had been captured in 1888 on the “perfected” phonograph introduced that year by Thomas Edison. But Edison had invented his original phonograph eleven years before that, in 1877—and recorded sound itself is even older. In the 1850s, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville of Paris created the phonautograph, an instrument which scratched records of aerial sound waves on soot-blackened paper, not for playback, but for visual study. This left a big disparity between when sound was first recorded (around 1857) and the earliest recorded sounds we could actually listen to (1888).

That changed in 2008 when FirstSounds.org released a sound file created from a phonautogram of “Au Clair de la Lune” as sung on April 9, 1860. Suddenly we could hear more distantly into the past than ever before.

Even so, the intervening history of recorded sound—including the transformation by American inventors of the phonautograph into a “talking machine”—has remained frustratingly silent. The indented tinfoil sheets produced by Edison’s exhibition phonographs of 1877-78 weren’t regarded as permanently playable recordings, and little care was taken to preserve them in a playable state. No intelligible sound recovered from a historical tinfoil recording has ever been published.

Patrick Feaster working with the collections. Photo by Carlene Stephens.

So what else exists from before 1888? If we exclude recordings that weren’t intended for playback or to be permanently playable, then the oldest sound recordings preserved today are found at the National Museum of American History—experimental phonograms made starting in 1881 by the Volta Laboratory Association, which consisted of telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell, scientific instrument maker Charles Sumner Tainter, and chemist Chichester A. Bell.

With the support of a Lemelson Center Fellowship and the help of curator Carlene Stephens, I carried out a study of early sound recordings at the Museum, including the Volta materials, between October and December 2011. By comparing artifacts from the Volta collection with experiments described in notebooks at the Museum and the Library of Congress, I was able to identify a number of unlabeled items. One of these—a small copper disc with a laterally modulated or “zig-zag” sound recording—turned out to have been prepared shortly before October 20, 1881, to test whether electrically depositing a layer of metal on a recorded wax disc, and then using the metal negative to stamp out copies, might work as a basis for duplication in a future recording industry. “In this way a piece of music, for instance, can be recorded once,” Tainter had speculated, “and any number of copies made from this original record, and the music reproduced from each of the copies.”

Copper negative of a recording made in October 1881. National Museum of American History, catalog number 312,119. Photo by Patrick Feaster.

The October 1881 date makes this one of the oldest known American sound recordings in existence, so a question naturally arises: What’s on it? The written documentation I could find identifies the disc’s content only vaguely as “words and sounds … shouted into the mouth-piece,” but the Volta group’s notebooks reveal the general kind of test recitation they were then using, as for example:

July 4, 1881: “Several trilled R’s—then—‘Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow, and every where that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.’—Several trilled R’s—then—‘How is that for high’—trilled R’s—and—One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—”

July 9, 1881: “There was a girl named O’Brian / Whose feet were like those of Orion, / To the circus she would go, / To see the great show, / And scratch the left ear of the lion. Trilled R’s. – ‘How is that for high’ more trilled R’s.”

Apart from the recurring expression “How is that for high”—roughly equivalent in 1881 to “How do you like them apples”—the most striking common denominator here is the “trilled R’s.” From laboratory notes, I could tell that this sound had recorded unusually well, and that the Volta group had often inserted it at beginnings, ends, and section breaks. But I didn’t know quite what it had sounded like. After all, nobody alive today had ever heard any of these experiments.

Charles Sumner Tainter’s drawing of the apparatus that recorded the original wax discs used in the duplication experiments of October 1881. Charles Sumner Tainter Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. Photo by Patrick Feaster

In December 2011, Dr. Carl Haber unveiled the first sounds extracted from Volta recordings using an optical scanning technology developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the Library of Congress. One of the items chosen for this pilot project was the copper disc from October 1881. So now, at last, we can hear, across a gulf of 130 years: Trilled R’s—one, two, three, four, five, six—trilled R’s.

PART 2: Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice

Dr. Patrick Feaster is an instructor in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and a Lemelson Center Fellow. This column originally appeared in Prototype, the Lemelson Center’s newsletter.

 

Electric cars: 100 years ago and today

“At slow speeds it runs on battery power,” transportation curator emeritus William Withuhn explained during my first ride in his 2003 Toyota Prius hybrid car. This was historic; not since the 1910s, when battery-powered cars were common, could mass-market vehicles cruise the streets silently and emission-free. Then, between 2006 and 2011, several manufacturers introduced new all-electric battery cars, betting that motorists would rather plug in at home than plug more and more money into gasoline pumps. Recently I visited a Tesla showroom, spoke with a Nissan LEAF salesman, and even looked at a solar charging station in a suburban shopping center.

The wave of the future? This sleek 1997 EV1 was an experimental electric car made by General Motors that was leased on a limited basis but never reached the market and was quickly discontinued. Broader development and sales of electric cars began a decade later amid rising gasoline prices and growing concerns about air pollution and global warming. Photo by Hugh Talman.

Will consumers accept cars with rechargeable lithium ion batteries as readily as they switched to digital cameras, cell phones, and iPods? Many people think that electric cars are better than gasoline models, not only because of lower operating costs, but because of quicker acceleration and cleaner air. But with so many virtues, why did electric cars disappear in the first place?

Studying the museum’s electric car collection helped me find the answers. In the early 20th century, motorists had a choice of electric, steam, or gasoline cars, and it wasn’t clear that any one type would dominate the market. Electricity was beginning to power home appliances, lights, and streetcars, so it seemed natural to put electric motors and batteries in carriages. Electric vehicles like the museum’s elegant 1900 Riker, utilitarian 1904 Columbia runabout, and well-upholstered 1914 Rauch and Lang were simple to operate, and they were clean, quiet, and comfortable.

This 1914 Rauch and Lang electric was the personal car of Marie D. Gorgas, wife of William C. Gorgas, Surgeon General of the Army. She donated it to NMAH in 1929. Photo by Veronica Conkling.

But cars were expensive, and so was electricity. A sizable market for electric cars developed among wealthy urban women, but price and technical challenges limited the market. An electric car didn’t run very far between charges, and its lead-acid batteries required frequent maintenance. Electricity for recharging batteries wasn’t even available in most of rural America until the 1930s, and Americans had an urge to travel long before then.

An easy-to-operate, electrically powered “parlor on wheels” provided expanded personal mobility for wealthy urban women in the 1900s and 1910s.

Most car buyers in the 1910s and 1920s chose gasoline cars, which were far from perfect but had much longer range between fill-ups. In most people’s minds, gasoline—not the car battery—was bottled lightning. Filling stations could be located anywhere, and before long, gasoline cars symbolized portable energy and expanded personal mobility.

The museum’s 1913 Ford Model T touring car is significant because of what’s not beneath the radiator. The first owner replaced the engine crank with an electric starter, combining the ease of an electric car with the range of a gasoline car. Photo by Harold Dorwin.

In 1912, several makers of gasoline cars dealt a fatal blow to the electric car by taking two of its best features-switch-on starting and electric lighting–and adding them to their own vehicles. The museum’s 1913 Ford Model T touring car still came with a starting crank and acetylene gas headlights, but the first owner replaced them with a state-of-the-art electric starter and electric headlights. By the late 1920s, those features were standard on new cars, and electric cars were all but extinct.

“Electrifying Cars,” an exhibit that opened at the musuem on October 27, 2011, looks at the market for electric cars 100 years ago and today and efforts to combine the advantages of electric and gasoline cars. Left, a 1904 Columbia electric car. Right, a 1913 Ford Model T touring car with an owner-installed electric starter and electric headlights. Photo by Harold Dorwin.

Fast forward to the 1990s, when California required that a percentage of new cars must emit no pollutants. The museum’s 1997 General Motors EV1 electric car is one of several makes and models developed to meet that mandate. Unlike other electric car prototypes, the EV1 was designed and built from scratch. It boasted sophisticated power control systems, lightweight materials, and an aerodynamic shape. But the company decided that the EV1 wouldn’t be commercially viable because of high production costs, and GM and all other manufacturers pulled the plug on electric cars.

Fast forward again to the early 21st century and headlines about escalating gasoline prices, surging global demand for gasoline, strained oil supplies, and global warming. GM introduced the Chevrolet Volt, a new type of electric car that runs on battery power with a gasoline-generator backup, while Nissan, Mitsubishi, Tesla, and Fisker introduced all-electric cars. With sales of electric cars close to 15,000 in 2011, a growing number of Americans are in the mood to turn on, plug in, and drop out of the oil distribution chain.

Roger White is Associate Curator for Road Transportation with the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Moving Beyond Earth: Innovations in Space

Editor's note: Listen to Matthew Hersch discuss the history behind the development of the space suit. From early high altitude suits, to women’s foundation garments and depictions in popular culture, Hersch covers the amazing story behind one of space exploration’s most important inventions.

This weekend, November 18 and 19, the National Air and Space Museum hosts the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation’s 2011 New Perspectives on Invention and Innovation symposium. This year, it promises to be a stimulating and exciting time as we ponder Moving Beyond Earth: Innovations in Space.

1981, The Space Shuttle program begins with the launch of Columbia, STS-1. Courtesy of NASA.

The task of this gathering is to consider the nature of invention and innovation in space. We, in general, have the belief that the technologies used to engage in spaceflight are by definition innovative. This may be true at some level, but the relationships between technological innovation; various space institutions; innovative concepts, practices, or organizations; and the people associated with each are intrinsically complex. Essentially nonlinear, these relationships allow innovation to take place, no doubt, but there does not seem to be a way to guarantee it. Those who seek to command innovation find that changes in inputs to various aspects of the systems, themselves designed to yield innovative alterations, do not necessarily ensure proportionate positive developments in output. It is non-linearity writ large.

1998, International Space Station begins operations. Photo courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum.

I find such discussions invigorating, and the symposium promises to bring together a range of thinkers about the subject to explore various aspect of space-technology innovation. Engineers such as Larry Williams of SpaceX, Haym Benaroya from Rutgers University, and Pablo de León from the University of North Dakota will offer discussions of some of the vexing questions we have about reaching into space and living and working there once we go there to stay. Historians such as Michael Neufeld of the National Air and Space Museum, Amy Foster of the University of Central Florida, and Matthew Hersch of the University of Pennsylvania unravel the complexity of past space efforts to help illuminate the present. And such policy leaders as scientist and astronaut Tom Jones and American University professor Howard McCurdy chart the course of future endeavors to reach beyond this planet to the larger cosmos.

1926, Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket. Photo courtesy of NASA.

These are just a few of the highlights of the symposium; it promises to be a rousing time, with keen observations and provocative perspectives on the past, present, and future of humanity of space. A full list of symposium sessions and times is available on the Lemelson Center’s website. Come one, come all!

Roger D. Launius is senior curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.