123 Year Old Voice Recording Discovered: Watch Video and Listen to Thomas Edison Recording

Thomas Edison created a 12 second recording of a woman’s voice reciting the first verse of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The recording is etched into a metal cylinder that had warped over time making it unplayable. Made for a talking doll briefly sold by phonograph inventor Thomas Edison, the record is the oldest known American recording of a woman’s voice and may be the oldest known record produced at Edison’s laboratory in West Orange New Jersey.

Watch Video and Listen to Early Thomas Edison Recording of a Woman’s Voice

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, recently helped develop an imaging technique to play Edison’s records without touching them. By piecing together millions of microscopic measurements, the researchers assembled a 3-D map of the entire cylinder. Software then translated this topographic map into audio signals.

Sound historian Patrick Feaster of Indiana University in Bloomington dated the cylinder to 1888 by finding several archival documents, including newspaper articles from that year that referred to the toy doll records. These accounts suggest that “these would have been the first phonograph recordings made with the intention of being sold to the public,” Feaster says.

It was discovered that in the late 1800s, Edison was trying to manufacture a new kind of doll, one that would use his phonograph to speak to its owners. Feaster believes that because the record is tin, it was probably an early prototype, made in 1888. In 1890, Edison received a patent for a talking doll phonograph using wax records and soon began selling the dolls. The dolls were fragile and were taken off the market within weeks of their debut.