According to CBC News,
People in Schenectady, N.Y., will get a chance tonight to hear something that hasn’t been heard publicly since 1878: a tinfoil recording made that year on what was then revolutionary equipment, Thomas Edison’s phonograph.
Gathering at the Museum of Innovation and Science, people will hear a rough-sounding 78 seconds of music and voice, as well as an explanation by Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory how he and his colleagues recovered the sound using digital techniques.
The tinfoil that Edison used was extremely thin and tolerated only a few plays before it began to wear down and even puncture
. . . The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man’s voice reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb and Old Mother Hubbard. The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme.
“Look at me; I don’t know the song,” he says. At a time when music lovers can carry thousands of digital songs on a player the size of a pack of gum, Edison’s tinfoil playback seems prehistoric. But it opens a key window into the development of recorded sound.
“In the history of recorded sound that’s still playable, this is about as far back as we can go,” said John Schneiter, a trustee at the Museum of Innovation and Science, where it will be played Thursday night in the city where Edison helped found the General Electric Co.