Stumbled across this intriguing website yesterday, about the work of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French inventor, who in 1857 received a patent for the phonautograph - twenty years before Edison invented the phonograph. And now, by means of 21st century wizardry, de Martinville's primitive sound tracings on blackened paper enable us to hear the human voice - not very clearly, but recognizably human - out of the long-silent past.
Last year, however, Giovannoni and crew realized that they had been playing the recording too fast; on their website, they offer a revised version which sounds more like a man's voice, probably the inventor's own. Listen to it and more sounds re-created from de Martinville's phonoautograms here.
Unfortunately, de Martinville was merely looking for a way to make a graphic representation of the human voice, with perhaps a view to creating a kind of automatic stenography one day; apparently, it didn't occur to him to pursue sound reproduction, which had to wait until Edison had a stroke of genius in 1877. Here's a short overview of the phonograph's origin, an invention that amazed the world - a talking machine!
Edison phonograph, circa 1899
Read more about the Edison phonograph and listen to sample recordings at the American Memory collection of the Library of Congress.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
