IT and Science: Alexander Bell’s experiments with audio-recordings heard for the first time since 1880s

American scientist Alexander Graham Bell foresaw many things, including that people could someday talk over a telephone. But the inventor certainly never could have anticipated that his audio-recording experiments in a Washington D.C. lab could be recovered 130 years later and played for a gathering of scientists, curators and journalists in the laboratory of the Library of Congress.

In the early 1880s Alexander Bell partnered with his cousin Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter to create Volta Laboratory Associates in Washington, where the scientists tried to record different sounds.

The early audio recordings - which revealed recitations of Shakespeare, numbers and other familiar lines - had been packed away and deemed obsolete at the Smithsonian Institution for more than a century. Many of the recordings are fragile, and until recently it had not been possible to listen to them without damaging the discs or cylinders.

The Library of Congress partnered with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, to offer the first listen of these early recordings. Scientists have spent the past 10 years to develop the technology to create high-resolution digital scans of the sound discs. The technology reads the sound from tiny grooves with light and a 3D camera.

The National Museum of American History (The Smithsonian Institute) holds a collection of 400 earliest audio recordings, including 200 from Bell's lab. Alexander Bell’s recordings will probably become an important resource for new research on communications and early technology now that they can be freely played back on the website. What is more, the recordings offer a glimpse into the dawn of the information age, when inventors were scrambling to make new discoveries and secure patents for the first telephones and phonographs, even early fiber optics.