Miles's blog

I recently wrote a blog about the children of some of my former colleagues living until 2100.  Today I want to look backwards.  Recently, sound technicians recovered the contents of some recordingsmade on wax cylinders in Europe in 1889.  The voices of famous German leaders were preserved and with new technology can be taken from the old wax cylinders without the necessity of actually playing them on their original machines.  This is completely amazing to me.  At the library exhibit I talked about in yesterday's blog they displayed one of Edison's wax cylinder recording devices.

The men recorded, former chancellor Otto von Bismarck and General Helmut von Moltke were old at the time they put their voices on wax.   Von Moltke was born in 1800, and yet we can still hear his voice today.  And not just in some museum.  Go to the New York Times website and you can listen to these recordings from the comfort of your own home (or in my case, discomfort).  Again, amazing.

Think about the world von Moltke was born into.  Their homes were lit at night, if at all, by candles or maybe oil lanterns.  Travel was only by foot or horse.  Advanced communication was by post road carrying letters written with a sturdy quill pen.  Rifles were still in the future.  An ocean crossing took weeks.  America had 16 states.  Twenty signers of the Declaration of Independence were still alive.  George Washington was president.  Napoleon ruled France.  Beethoven wrote his first symphony.  People could only sit for portraits to preserve their likeness.

By the time von Moltke spoke to Edison’s employee he could turn on electric lights, talk on the telephone and take a steamship across the Atlantic in a week or so.  He could ride to the dock in a motorcar, and document his journey with a camera.  I suppose the idea of recording sound was to him just another incredible invention of which he had seen so many in his lifetime.  

And we can listen to him speak anytime we want merely by pressing a button. (Well, in addition to paying way too much for internet service, a router, a computer, etc.)  We have come to take for granted the technology we rely on, but to those born when von Moltke was their world was changed in far more dramatic ways than we can imagine.