We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like

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    We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell

    Sounded Like. Until NowSmithsonian researchers used optical technology to play back the unplayable records

    This wax-and-cardboard disc from 1885 contains a recording of Bells voice. (Richard Strauss / NMAH, SI)

    Audio of the famous inventor speaking was discovered on June 20, 2012

    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 worlds most important acoustical devicethe telephonemight 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 oldclearheaded,

    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 Bells voice from a

    recording held by the Smithsoniana 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 Bells 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 Bells 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 Bells 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.

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    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 Hamlets 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 cylindersmany 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, 1885a date

    now deciphered from a wax inscriptioncontained 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 whereofhear 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 ShawsPygmalion;

    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 granddaughters word, the intonation of the British Isles was unmistakable in Bells speech. The voice is

    vigorous and forthrightas was the inventor, at last speaking to us across the years.

    Never Underestimate the Power of a Paint Tube

    Without this simple invention, impressionists such as Claude Monet wouldnt have been able to create their works of genius

    The tin tube was more resilient than its predecessor (the pig bladder), enabling painters to leave their studios. (Chrysler Museum of Art)

    The French Impressionists disdained laborious academic sketches and tastefully muted paintings in favor of stunning colors and textures that

    conveyed the immediacy of life pulsating around them. Yet the breakthroughs of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and others would not have been

    possible if it hadnt been for an ingenious but little-known American portrait painter, John G. Rand.

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    Like many artists, Rand, a Charleston native living in London in 1841, struggled to keep his oil paints from drying out before he could use them.

    At the time, the best paint storage was a pigs bladder sealed with string; an artist would prick the bladder with a tack to get at the paint. But

    there was no way to completely plug the hole afterward. And bladders didnt travel well, frequently bursting open.

    Rands brush with greatness came in the form of a revolutionary invention: the paint tube. Made from tin and sealed with a screw cap, Rands

    collapsible tube gave paint a long shelf life, didnt leak and could be repeatedly opened and closed.

    The eminently portable paint tube was slow to be accepted by many French artists (it added considerably to the price of paint), but when it

    caught on it was exactly what the Impressionists needed to abet their escape from the confines of the studio, to take their inspiration directly

    from the world around them and commit it to canvas, particularly the effect of natural light. For the first time in history, it was practical to

    produce a finished oil painting on-site, whether in a garden, a caf or in the countryside (although art critics would long argue if Impressionist

    paintings were truly finished). For his 1885 canvasWaves at the Manneporte(pictured at left)bursting with red, blue, violet, yellow and

    greenClaude Monet had to walk along several beaches and through a long dark tunnel in a cliff side to reach the Manneporte, an extraordinary

    rock outcrop on the rough northern coast of France. On one occasion, he and his easel were nearly swept off the beach into the sea. Waves at the

    Manneporteappears to have been created on the spot in two or three sessions. (Sand from the beach can be found embedded in the paint.)

    Rands tubes carried inside them another crucial element as well: new colors. Paint pigments had remained nearly unchanged since the

    Renaissance. Since oil paints were time-consuming to produce and quick to dry out, artists prepared only a few colors to work with during a

    painting session and would fill injust one area of a canvas at a time (such as a blue sky or red dress). But Rands tin tubes enabled the

    Impressionists to take full advantage of dazzling new pigmentssuch as chrome yellow and emerald greenthat had been invented by

    industrial chemists in the 19th century. With the full rainbow of colors from tubes on their palettes, the Impressionists could record a fleeting

    moment in its entirety. Dont paint bit by bit, Camille Pissarro advised, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere.

    Pierre-Auguste Renoir said, Without colors in tubes, there would be no Czanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism. Some

    revolutions began with the squeeze of a trigger; others required just the squeeze.

    Nikola Teslas Amazing Predictions for the 21st Century

    In the 1930s journalists from publications like theNew York TimesandTimemagazine would regularly visit Nikola Tesla at his home on the

    20th floor of the Hotel Governor Clinton in Manhattan. There the elderly Tesla would regale them with stories of his early days as an inventor

    and often opined about what was in store for the future.

    Last year we looked atTeslas prediction that eugenicsand the forced sterilization of criminals and other supposed undesirables would

    somehow purify the human race by the year 2100. Today we have more from that particular article which appeared in the February 9, 1935,

    issue ofLibertymagazine. The article is unique because it wasnt conducted as a simple interview like so many of Teslas other media

    appearances from this time, but rather is credited as by Nikola Tesla, as told to George Sylvester Viereck.

    Its not clear where this particular article was written, but Teslas friendly relationship with Viereck leads me to believe it may not have been at

    his Manhattan hotel home. Interviews with Tesla at this time would usually occur at the Hotel, but Tesla would sometimes dine with Viereck

    and his family at Vierecks home on Riverside Drive,meaning that its possible they could have written it there.

    Viereck attached himself to many important people of his time, conducting interviews with such notable figures as Albert Einstein, Teddy

    Roosevelt and even Adolf Hitler. As a German-American living in New York, Viereck was a rather notorious propagandist for the Nazi regime

    http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2013/04/nikola-teslas-amazing-predictions-for-the-21st-century/http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2013/04/nikola-teslas-amazing-predictions-for-the-21st-century/http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60E12F73958177A93C2A8178CD85F408385F9http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60E12F73958177A93C2A8178CD85F408385F9http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60E12F73958177A93C2A8178CD85F408385F9http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19310720,00.htmlhttp://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19310720,00.htmlhttp://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19310720,00.htmlhttp://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2012/11/nikola-tesla-the-eugenicist-eliminating-undesirables-by-2100/http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2012/11/nikola-tesla-the-eugenicist-eliminating-undesirables-by-2100/http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2012/11/nikola-tesla-the-eugenicist-eliminating-undesirables-by-2100/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sylvester_Viereckhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sylvester_Viereckhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sylvester_Viereckhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_Drive_(Manhattan)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_Drive_(Manhattan)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_Drive_(Manhattan)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_Drive_(Manhattan)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sylvester_Viereckhttp://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2012/11/nikola-tesla-the-eugenicist-eliminating-undesirables-by-2100/http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19310720,00.htmlhttp://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60E12F73958177A93C2A8178CD85F408385F9http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2013/04/nikola-teslas-amazing-predictions-for-the-21st-century/
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    and was tried and imprisoned in 1942 for failing to register with the U.S. government as such. He was released from prison in 1947, a few years

    after Teslas death in 1943. Its not clear if they had remained friends after the government started to become concerned about Vierecks

    activities in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

    Tesla had interesting theories on religion, science and the nature of humanity which well look at in a future post, but for the time being Ive

    pulled some of the more interesting (and often accurate) predictions Tesla had for the future of the world.

    Creation of the EPA

    The creation of the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) was still 35 years away, but Tesla predicted a similar agencys creation within a

    hundred years.

    Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far

    more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War. The pollution of

    our beaches such as exists today around New York City will seem as unthinkable to our children and grandchildren as life without plumbing

    seems to us. Our water supply will be far more carefully supervised, and only a lunatic will drink unsterilized water.

    Education, War and the Newspapers of Tomorrow

    Tesla imagined a world where new scientific discoveries, rather than war, would become a priority for humanity.

    Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first

    century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new

    scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific

    discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere stick in the

    back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

    Health and Diet

    Toward the end of Teslas life he had developed strange theories about the optimal human diet. He dined on little more than milk and honey in

    his final days, believing that this was the purest form of food. Tesla lost an enormous amount of weight and was looking quite ghastly by the

    early 1940s. This meager diet and his gaunt appearance contributed to the common misconception that he was penniless at the end of his life.

    Morepeople die or grow sick from polluted water than from coffee, tea, tobacco, and other stimulants. I myself eschew all stimulants. I also

    practically abstain from meat. I am convinced that within a century coffee, tea, and tobacco will be no longer in vogue. Alcohol, however, will

    still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life. The abolition of stimulants will not come about forcibly. It will simply be no longer

    fashionable to poison the system with harmful ingredients.Bernarr Macfaddenhas shown how it is possible to provide palatable food based

    upon natural products such as milk, honey, and wheat. I believe that the food which is served today in his penny restaurants will be the basis

    of epicurean meals in the smartest banquet halls of the twenty-first century.

    There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world, including the teeming millions of China and India, now chronically on

    the verge of starvation. The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a

    process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agencyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agencyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agencyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernarr_Macfaddenhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernarr_Macfaddenhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernarr_Macfaddenhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernarr_Macfaddenhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agency
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    Robots

    Teslas work in robotics began in the late 1890s when he patented hisremote-controlled boat,an invention that absolutelystunned onlookersat

    the 1898 Electrical Exhibition at Madison Square Garden.

    At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The

    solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine.

    Innumerable activities still performed by human hands today will be performed by automatons. At this very moment scientists working in the

    laboratories of American universities are attempting to create what has been described as a thinking machine. I anticipated this develo pment

    I actually constructed robots. Today the robot is an accepted fact, but the principle has not been pushed far enough. In the twenty-first

    century the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization. There is no reason at all why most of this should not

    come to pass in less than a century, freeing mankind to pursue its higher aspirations.

    Cheap Energy and the Management of Natural Resources

    Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all

    devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every

    household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be

    development along ideal rather than material lines.

    Tesla was a visionary whose many contributions to the world are being celebrated today more than ever. And while his idea of the perfect diet

    may have been a bit strange, he clearly understood many of the things that 21st century Americans would value (like clean air, clean food, and

    our thinking machines) as we stumble into the future.

    http://www.google.com/patents?id=T1VrAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://www.google.com/patents?id=T1VrAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://www.google.com/patents?id=T1VrAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab_remotec.htmlhttp://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab_remotec.htmlhttp://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab_remotec.htmlhttp://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab_remotec.htmlhttp://www.google.com/patents?id=T1VrAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=false