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SALT LAKE CITY — A collection of wax recording cylinders containing the voices of powerful 19th-century German statesmen, hidden for decades in Thomas Edison's laboratory, have resurfaced and are giving a voice to the silent history of an entire era.
Included among the phonograph records is one of the powerful German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. It is the only known recording of the man who oversaw the formation a powerful German Empire under Prussian leadership.
Other recordings bring to life Helmuth von Moltke, a German field marshal who is widely regarded as one of the great military strategists of the latter 19th century. Moltke, who made the recordings at 89, provides the only known recording of someone born in the 18th century.
Transcripts of the recordings show the German leaders reciting lines from songs and poems: in Bismarck's case, In Good Old Colony Times and Gaudeamus igitur. He also recited as well as the beginning of the poem Als Kaiser Rotbart lobesam and, controversially, the first few lines of the French national anthem, the Marseillaise.
Other recordings contain performances of famous Romantic-era musical pieces by German and Hungarian performers, including what is thought to be the first recording of a piece by Chopin.
The recordings, from 1889 and 1890, were the work of Adelbert Wangemann, Edison's assistant and the world's first professional sound recordist. Wangemann had set out in June 1889 on a trip to Europe on Edison's behalf, not to return until Feb. 1890. Originally only there to preserve the phonographs and cylinders already on display at the world's fair in Paris, Wangemann decided during the latter part of his trip to expand the collection.
The recordings were first discovered in the library of Edison's lab in 1957, all nestled in a wooden box, hiding in a cabinet near the great inventor's cot. The 17 cylinders were mostly unlabeled, some broken or chipped, others still in fair condition. Scientists at the time did not have the tools to play the recordings, so they were tucked away, forgotten for decades.
In 2005, Ulrich Lappenküper, director of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in Friedrichsruh, Germany, began searching for the lost recordings, which were documented in the foundation's archive. Lappenküper assumed the recordings had been lost after searching the United States and Germany for them.
In 2011, though, the intrepid curator of the Edison laboratory decided to convert the analog electric signals of the recordings into broadcast WAV files, allowing historians to attempt to identify the voices contained therein.
Two historians, Stephan Puille and Patrick Feaster, of Indiana University and the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, respectively, were able to identify the voices based on context clues and known information about Wangemann's trip including telegrams and travel records. One surviving telegram sent from Wangemann to Edison details the promised recordings of Bismarck and Moltke.
Until this discovery, the only recording thought to have survived Wangemann's trip was a recording of Brahms playing a portion of his first Hungarian Dance. The quality of the well-known recording was low, though, potentially damaging the reputations of both Edison and Wangemann.
Now, though, historians have new ground to cover, fertile with opportunity for greater insight into late 19th-century European society. Who, or what, Wangemann found worthy of recording to send back to Edison can provide as much insight into the past as what was actually said or played for the recordings — ending the silence of an era long past.
