Just one, two, three, four.

Welcome to audiophile, nature's sound science series.

I'm Ewan Calloway, and in this episode I'm going in search of lost sound.

Wow. episode, I'm going in search of lost sound.

That's the voice of Alexander Melville Bell, the father of inventor, Alexander Graham Bell.

He's reading a line from Hamlet. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

Bell captured his father's voice in 1881.

It's one of the earliest audio recordings ever made, but it was nearly lost forever.

You had things that were falling apart in some cases.

This is Carl Haber. He's a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, and he's

managed to resurrect Bell's early recordings, including the one you just heard. They hadn't

been played for nearly a century. They're too delicate to touch with a needle. You had things that

every time you touch them, you would degrade them further through the playback mechanism.

Lots of early recordings are like this.

Yet within that material, there was just a huge amount of significant information.

Musical history, interviews.

Despite his physics background, Haver's really into history.

The past is a fixed thing. They're not making any more of it.

I think it's tremendously, personally, think it's tremendously important that we preserve the past.

We'll get to the rest of his story soon enough.

But first, I want to tell you about a man who asked if there were even older recordings out there, just waiting to be heard.

I first came across Richard Woodbridge, the third, just searching on the internet.

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