Gizmodo: edison

Retromodo: Electric Light is Strange and Terrifying

Sean Fallon — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:20:00 EST

You know, I thought electric light here in the 19th century was the devil's work. In fact, I must say that when I walked into this room filled with the strange candle-less fire I almost soiled my pantaloons. Thankfully, Mr. Edison's disclaimer on the wall put my mind at ease. [NextNature via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Plastic Cup Gramophone Kit: Edison's Invention Reproduced

Kit Eaton — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:51:35 EDT

Those of you amused by the Edison recording outrage will love this: a toy gramophone kit that lets you record and play back your voice from a plastic cup. Made by Gekken, a Japanese company that produces educational toys, it uses exactly the same principle as Edison's, with the neat use of a plastic cup as the audio horn. Apparently the kit's available in limited quanities, since MAKE magazine brought some back from Japan and Gekken no longer make it. But once you've seen the video of a Japanese guy singing Hey Jude into one and playing it back, you'll be wanting one.

Awesome, no? Teach your kids about real audio recording, not this MP3 digital nonsense, for just $35. [MAKE via Gadget Lab]

Earliest Audio Recording Resurrected, Scares the Genitals Off Us

Jesus Diaz — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:35:00 EDT

Audio historian David Giovannoni and scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered and brought back to life the first audio recording ever made, 17 years before Edison's patent. The ten-second snippet was made on a phonoautograph, a device that only recorded sounds but didn't play them back, so they had to do some voodoo to resurrect it and play it back. And after you hear it, you will agree on the voodoo part.

The audio recording, a verse of "Au Clair de la Lune" sung by a woman/zombie/spirit/ghostard, was made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Scott was a Parisian typesetter and inventor who invented the phonoautograph, and died thinking Edison stole his idea for recording sound (just like he stole and ran Méliès out of the movie business).

However, while the fact is that Edison stole many things, this is not one of them, according to Giovannoni: "Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery." Another scholar, Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University remarked that "what made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to reproduce sound and he succeeded."

The phonoautograph is a device that only prints the sound it captures, but it can't reproduce it. Giovannoni and his team had to digitally process the recording, made on April 9, 1860, to create the version you can listen to here. [NYT]