In November I wrote about the "Utopia on the Prairie", Bishop Hill, founded in
1846 by religious Swedish immigrants in Illinois. My article also covered
other similar utopian colonies, but I won't repeat it here. You can find it in
the archive of the SKRIVA lista,
https://www.freelists.org/post/skriva/Rec-Historien-om-Bishop-HillO-Isaksson ;
(or ask me, and I'll send you my latest EAPAzine which reprints the article!).
And here's more about Bishop Hill: http://www.bishophill.com
Yesterday (Dec 7) I went to an event at the Royal Library in Stockholm about
early phonograph recordings from Bishop Hill. We could hear the *third oldest
human being recorded*, the Swedish shoemaker Peter Wickblom, born 1810.
The meeting was lead by David Isaksson, journalist and son of Olov Isaksson
who wrote a book about Bishop Hill. The small town is since 1984 a National
Historic Landmark in the US, since it is one of very few prairie towns
virtually untouched by time. Its buildings have been carefully restored and it
is now a popular tourist site.
When the Swedish photographer Sören Hallgren went to Bishop Hill in the late
1960's he came in contact with two sisters, daughters of one Jonas Berggren, an
ingenious Bishop Hill farmer who built his own phonograph. And he made a numer
of recordings with it, in and around the town. (A picture was shown with 25 of
his vax cylinders.) Three of these was with the shoemaker Peter Wickblom
(1810-1906) who emigrated from Sweden in 1846 to settle in Bishop Hill. He is
the third oldest human whose voice has been recorded!
You can hear it on this site:
http://www.ljudminnen.se/9.htm
A recording with Buffalo Bill (from late 19th Century) starts automatically,
but click on the sound symbol for "Skomakare Peter Wickblom" (recorded in 1904)
if you want to hear him.
He tells (in Swedish) about the difficult trip over the Atlantic, when their
ship was close to sink in a storm and they had to man the pumps around the
clock. (The recording is very scratchy, but the Royal Library audience was also
shown a transcript.)
As the recording was made in 1904 and Edison's great invention, the
phonograph, came in 1877, it's not one of the oldest recordings. But as he was
born in 1810 he is one of the oldest persons recorded.
Only two older recorded voices are known to exist, both born in 1809.
We have the British Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809-1898) here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F957zdE3m8
And the poet Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892):
http://www.openculture.com/2011/08/voices_from_the_19th_century.html
To be honest, Edison's invention wasn't the first to record human voices but
the first to also be able to reproduce it (which still is a huge achievement!).
The Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville developed a system he called
the phonoautograph, which recorded sound waves on sooted paper - but there was
no way to play it back until our times. (When the paper could be digitalised
and computers could make out the sound from the soot marks.) The earliest
recording of a human voice which has been found from the phonoautograph papers
is rom April 9th, 1860 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBL7V3zGMUA
It's a man or woman singing the French folk song. (But the singer must be
over 50 years old to be be older than the trio Gladstone, Tennyson and
Wickblom, which is unlikely.)
Thomas Alva Edisons earliest preserved recording seemes to be from September
1878, the sound of the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad in New York:
http://www.firstsounds.org/research/merr.php#sounds
Since he had invented his phonograph the year before, he certainly made many
recordings before that. His original Mary Had a Little Lamb recording is not
preserved, but he recites it on a later recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRJpn02crbI
Jonas Berggren's phonograph cylinders were bought by the Royal Library in
Stockholm in 1993, when they were auctioned off (I guess the last of the
sisters had died). The library representatives had a blank cheque with them
from a Swedish charity foundation.
The figure they had to write on it for the Berggren collection of vax
cylinders was US Dollars 2 700. The Royal Library think it was worth it.
--Ahrvid
More about early sound recordings (or just google "phonograph" and "mp3"):
http://www.firstsounds.org
http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/oldest-recordings/
http://www.tinfoil.com
https://smdb.kb.se/catalog/search?q=fonograf&x=0&y=0
(Note: This is the Swedish Media DataBase, run by the Royal Library. The above
link is after searching "fonograf" - Swedish spelling - and to the left opens a
list of what they now have digitalised, incl a number of the Bishop Hill
recordings. They have much more but making sound files takes time, especially
for scratchy phonograh cylinders which need expert care and sound filtering and
adjustment.)
--
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