You Hear Dead People

Shuffle enough random songs and you're certain to hear singers who are no longer among the living. Before 1877, hearing voices of the dead would have been a supremely blood curdling experience. Yet we weirdos of today routinely listen to the sounds of the departed; we usually don’t even think about it. The invention of the phonograph fundamentally changed that aspect of the human condition, and altered how human-made sounds could travel through both space and time. Understanding how people reacted to this technology when it first arrived can reveal something important about who we’ve become.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | Episode 3 | Doug Sofer

You Hear Dead People

©2023 Doug Sofer

Intro 

•   [Begin vamp but when I start ‘talking’ to Arthur Sullivan, fade it out]

•   Welcome back to another episode of this scintillating new podcast about how history helps you come to grips with the Strangeness of Now.

•   Listeners, I’m thrilled to announce that we have an extremely special, world-famous guest with us today.

•   It’s none other than the English composer, Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan. 

•   You probably know him as part of the famous comic opera-writing powerhouse duo of Gilbert and Sullivan.

•   [fade out vamp.]

•   Welcome Sir Arthur!

•   Can I call you Sir Arthur? What do you like to be called?

•   [Sullivan: “Arthur Sullivan”]

•   Okay—but not—like—Sir Arthur for short?

•   [Sullivan: “Arthur Sullivan”]

•   Okay. Got it.

•   So—Arthur Sullivan, it seems the public hasn’t heard from you in a while. 

•   It’s really amazing that you’ve come back to chat with me and my awesome audience full of brilliant, supportive, generous and, I hope, easily-flatterable listeners.

•   [pause]

•   Hey before we get started, you know that I’m sort of a musician myself. I was wondering what you thought of the theme song that I made for this podcast.

•   [Sullivan: saying @ 38s—“For myself, I can only say I am astonished and somewhat terrified….”]

•   Sorry, it’s a little hard to hear you—we must have a bad connection. I’ll have my IT team look into that.

•   Did you say you’re astonished and somewhat terrified? Why are you terrified?

•   [Sullivan: “I am…terrified at the thought that such hideous and bad music should be put on record forever.”]

•   [long pause]

•   Ouch!

•   [pause]

•   Hideous and bad music? Now that just hurts my feelings, Arthur Sullivan.

•   I’m doing the best I can, okay? Not everyone can be as talented and famous as you, sir.

•   [pause]

•   Okay, so not a big fan of the theme song. But what do you think of this podcast in general?

•   [1:13ish “…I think it is the most wonderful thing that I have ever experienced and I congratulate you with all my heard.”

•   Whoa! Talk about a mixed review!

•   Well, okay. So Sir Arthu—[interrupts “Arthur Sullivan”]—Yes, sorry—Arthur Sullivan. So my IT people have gotten back to me and they said that the reason our connection is spotty is that you sir, are, in fact, dead.

•   Is it true that you lived from 1842 to 1900 and that you have, in fact, been deceased for something like 122 years?

•   [long pause]

•   [0:36ish “I beg you will excuse me.”]

•   [Footsteps and door slam noise]

•   Hey, he left!

•   Well I guess that answers my question.

•   [Pause]

•   Wait. Does it? I don’t know.

•   [Pause]

•   Either way, rest in peace, Arthur Sullivan. You are missed—and you have been missed—for something like 1.2 centuries.

•   [Pause & resume vamp]

•   So much for my guest. It looks like it’s just you and me again, Listener.

•   And while we’re hanging out, I’d like to call your attention to the fact that you and I just did something extremely strange when understood in historical perspective.

•   [brief pause]

•   We just heard a dead man’s voice.

•   Until Thomas Edison and his team invented the phonograph in 1877, no human being had ever been able to do what we just did—a thing we now take for granted—as normal.

•   In fact, sound recording technology and its implications fundamentally changed many aspects of life today.

•   [PRE-BUILD-UP] You know folks, when you consider what it means to listen to the nonliving, you might start to feel a little out-of-sorts—possibly even creepy [eerie effect on word].

•   [THEME BUILD]

•   But don’t worry. I’m a professional historian and I’m trained to assist people in situations exactly like yours.

•   My name is Doug Sofer. And I’m a weirdo. Just. Like. You. 

•   [THEME]

•   [SPONSORSHIP BLURB]

When Recording Was New

•   The idea of communing with the deceased used to fall within the realm of the paranormal.

•   But today, there’s nothing para about it at all; it’s just regular-normal for virtually all of us.

•   And you are a weirdo [divebomb]

•   …is the name of this podcast, so fortunately this topic is right up our alley.

•   Today’s episode is called [whispering] You Hear Dead People.

•   It’s about how the recording of sound forever changed what had been a basic truth of the human condition.

•   That  is, until the 1877 invention of the phonograph, the only way to hear a person’s voice would be if that individual were somewhere reasonably close to you in both space and time.

•   Today, we don’t reflect often enough about how audio recording technology changes us, and sets us apart from the rest of our species. 

•   Even the parents of a person who’s 100 years old today would probably have been born well after 1877—though that centenarian would likely retain childhood memories of grandparents born before 1877.

•   Today, the only humans without access to recorded voices include people who live in extremely remote places, or some others deliberately living off the grid.

•   [pause]

•   But examining historical evidence from around the time when the phonograph came into being gives us a new perspective on our lives. 

•   We start to learn how amazing—or disturbing—or just weird—it was for our fellow humans to have gone from a world without the ability to record voices, to one where it suddenly became possible.

•   [long pause]

•   One of the first people to talk about these new possibilities was none other than Thomas Alva Edison himself.

•   It’s important to remember that in 1877 when Edison and his team created the first phonograph, it wasn’t like you could just go out and pick up one of these babies at the corner store along with a sack of parsnips.

•   Even a full year after the phonograph was invented, there were still no more than forty of them in existence, and they cost the  mind-bogglingly high price of $10,000 bucks—something roughly like $300,000 today—and that even those were basically what we’d call prototypes; they just didn’t yet work that well yet.

•   But Edison was as talented in his ability to get people stoked about his products as he was in his technical prowess.

•   In 1878, a year after the phonograph’s invention, he wrote a little article called “The Phonograph and Its Future” where he explained how these things could be useful to humanity.

•   [Pause]

•   He starts by describing business applications. A phonograph could record important information like a business letter without the need of a stenographer standing by.

•   Because, in Edison’s words, it creates a [QE] “Perfect record” of a voice, it could be used in courtrooms so that the proceedings can be perfectly preserved.

•   [pause]

•   Then he discusses educational applications. You could create “talking books” for blind people—and for sighted people too.

•   And you could have professional readers make recordings of books because there’s “[QE] greater enjoyment to be had from a book when read by an elocutionist than when read by the average reader.”

•   At least according to Edison.

•   And you can preserve languages too—complete with accents and inflective subtleties.

•   He predicted too that future toys would contain tiny phonographs in them:

•   Animal toys that actually bark or moo or meow; Baby dolls that actually reproduce baby-talk; Choo-choo trains that actually choo-choo.

•   Edison prophesized that the clocks of the future would speak. Instead of just chiming a bunch of bells at noon, they would call you to lunch in a human voice. Or they could, in Edison’s words, “send your lover home at ten, etc.”

•   [pause]

•   In fact, in 1878, the very same year that Edison made this prediction, a French-American inventor named Frank Lambert [Lam-BERRh], built an Edison-style phonograph into a clock.

•   He recorded a bunch of different sounds on to a lead cylinder. Today it’s the oldest known sound recording that had been specifically designed to be played back. It sounds like this:

•   [play part of ‘o’clock section’]

•   And the last part of this big ‘ol chunk of lead sounds like this:

•   [Play weird noises at the end]

•   That last part doesn’t sound much like a dead person at all—but it’s definitely a dead something.

•   The general consensus seems to be that Lambert recorded that final section backwards. He may also have been experimenting with different recording speeds, or adding bells and/or other noisy things or different voices, and so on.

•   [pause]

•   So yeah the talking clock may have needed some work before it could successfully send your lover home at ten.

•   Listening to those garbled alien noises would likely just leave your lover confused and unlikely to ever visit you again.

•   [pause]

•   But from the perspective of 1878, audio recording technology didn’t have to be ready for prime time. It was the phonograph’s promise that captivated Edison and his contemporaries; its ability to preserve sounds that up until that moment had been un-preservable.

•   [pause]

•   For that reason, in that same article, Edison specifically mentions his invention’s ability to preserve the voices of dead people. He says that phonographs can be used as what he calls a “Family Record.”

•   He writes: [QE] “For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family—as of great men—the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph.”

•   [pause]

•   I didn’t know we were ranking the different kinds of O-Graphs, but Edison always knew how to talk up his inventions.

•   [pause]

•   And as we’re about to see, Edison’s enthusiasm when it came to hyping his products was infectious.

•   [Separator Music]

Bottling Orators’ Voices

•   Edison’s hype machine fired up the imaginations of reporters—so much so that they started talking about the phonograph long before they even ever heard one in action.

•   I’m now looking at an article in the New York Times from November 7, 1877. It’s what we’d call a feature or opinion piece today, and the title is simply “The Phonograph.”

•   The Times writer discusses how the phonograph takes sound and, 

•   [QE] “…bottles it up for future use.”

•   It allows the best sermons and the best speeches by the best preachers and best orators of the present-day—that’s 1877—and preserve them forever.

•   [quote effect] “The lecturer will no longer require his audience to meet him in a public hall, but will sell his lectures in quart bottles, at fifty cents each; and the politician, instead of howling himself hoarse on the platform, will have a pint of his best speech put into the hands of each one of his constituents.”

•   The article predicts that enterprising entrepreneurs will sell “bottled sermons.” Smaller congregations that can’t afford to hire a full-time pastor will just be able to uncork and pour out their favorite preacher whenever they want.

•   For good measure, the article quips that:

•   [quote effect] “…the practice of personal preaching will be continued, since in no other way can a weekly opportunity be afforded to ladies for mutual bonnet inspection.”

•   [pause]

•   That somewhat mean-spirited joke must’ve had them rolling in the pews back in 1877.

•   [pause]

•   It goes on, predicting that in the future:

•   “Whether a man has or has not a wine-cellar, he will certainly, if he wishes to be regarded as a man of taste, have a well-stocked oratorical cellar.”

•   It predicts that one hundred years in the future that people will be able to listen to all of the best public speakers of 1877.

•   The writer mentions these speakers by name: Abolitionist speakers like Wendell Phillips; or clergymen famous for their sermons such as the Reverend Stephen Tyng. And the Republican writer and speaker George William Curtis.

•   And despite the jab about bonnet inspections, the article’s author also mentions among the notable orators of the day important women’s rights advocates—specifically Anna Dickinson and Gail Hamilton—who were also both also abolitionists.

•   [pause]

•   All of these distinguished orators’ bottled speech can be easily decanted [pouring sound] so that people from the wondrous future year of 1977 can appreciate these celebrities’ rhetorical skills.

•   [pause]

•   Despite the Times’ optimism about how many of the voices of 1877 would be bottled-up, as far as I can tell, only two of the dozen or so orators mentioned in the article were actually able to record their voices by phonograph.

•   Most don’t seem to have attempted it—or had the opportunity to do so. If they did, they never succeeded in recording their speeches or sermons, or those recordings have been lost or destroyed.

•   [pause]

•   And then there’s Mark Twain—also mentioned in the Times piece. 

•   In 1891, Twain tried to record himself reading his novel The American Claimant but he didn’t like how it sounded. He complained in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells:

•   [QE] “You can't write literature with it… because it hasn’t any ideas… [I] t hasn't any gift for elaboration, or smartness of talk, or vigor of action, or felicity of expression, but is just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, & as grave & unsmiling as the devil.”

•   Not to say that Twain gave up on it easily. He evidently spent 48 wax cylinders in the attempt to record this would-be audiobook—and all of those cylinders are now lost.

•   Then in 1909, nearly two decades after complaining about this devil technology to his friend, he tried to record the novel again.

•   Those recordings he made—flat disk-shaped records at that point—were destroyed in the fire that took out Edison’s laboratory five years later. [Smithsonian Mag]

•   There is a short silent movie of Twain at his home in Connecticut that shows him walking around his house, smoking a stogie, and making at least one of his grown daughters laugh. You can find a link to this source on findyourselfinhistory.com .

•   But the name of this episode is not You See Dead People. Nor is it “Dead Man Walking—Around His House.”

•   Wait that last one doesn’t get whispered…

•   The fact remains that unless someone finds a lost recording somewhere, Twain’s voice is gone forever.

•   It’s every bit as gone forever as is George Washington’s voice or Cleopatra’s.

•   [pause]

•   Meanwhile, the first voice I could find of the orators mentioned in the Times article is by the Presbyterian preacher Thomas De Witt Talmage who lived from 1832–1902 and who was what we today would call an early adopter when it came to technology.

•   Talmage famously offered long-distance sermons via the early telephone; these were some of the very first remote religious services.

•   On April 8, 1898, he branched out to the phonograph, cutting a new recording of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.” The recorded version sounds like this:

•   [play excerpt]

•   By contrast, the other public speaker mentioned in the article whose recorded voice I could find, was not a churchman at all

•   He was sort of the opposite.

•   Robert G. Ingersoll, who lived between 1833–1899 was nicknamed “The Great Agnostic” for his general criticism of organized religion.

•   The recording I found by him is a poem that speaks to a personification of “Liberty” herself. This one is especially hard to hear, but I have a link on findyourselfinhistory.com to a written version of this poem. Here’s a little excerpt:

•    “Thou askest nought from men except the things that good men hate—the whip, the chain, the dungeon key. Thou hast no popes nor priests who stand between their fellowmen and thee.”

•   [long pause]

•   In case you missed it, what he says here to Liberty is this: [repeat quote]

•   Pretty provocative stuff.

•   [pause]

•   Either way, whether we’re pouring chalices overflowing with scriptural passages or tankards full of religious skepticism, it’s clear that the quality of these old bottles may be a bit past their prime for serving at your fancy dinner.

•   But when you think about it, I think you’ll agree that this New York Times writer was right; it’s amazing—and, I’d hasten to add, maybe even kind of weird—that you can hear these bottled voices at all.

•   [pause]

•   The Times writer predicted more than just a wondrous, happy future full of bottles of vintage speech.

•   The article also foretells a world in which phonographs make reading obsolete.

•   [QE] “Why should we print a speech when it can be bottled, and why should we learn to read when, if some skillful elocutionist merely repeats one of ‘George Eliot’s’ novels aloud in the presence of a phonograph, we can subsequently listen to it without taking the slightest trouble?”

•   This snarky writer snarkily concludes:

•   [QE] “Blessed will be the lot of the small boy of the future. He will never have to learn his letters or to wrestle with the spelling-book, and if he does not revere the name of the inventor of the phonograph, he will be utterly destitute of all gratitude.”

•   Though getting small children to say thank you is certainly difficult, the Times’ author’s other prediction was a bit off.

•   The success of the phonograph ultimately would come much less from bottled speeches and much more from canned music. And sadly, the speeches of most of the great orators of this writer’s day were never bottled at all.

•   [pause]

•   Again, that’s because recording technology had simply not been ready for prime time back in 1870s—or even the 1880s or most of the 1890s.

•   But the situation changed over multiple decades as new scientific and technological breakthroughs made the phonograph more viable.

•   Experiments with recording media made records more consistent.

•   At the same time, inventors kept improving the way you input sound on to a phonograph. They invented electric microphones to replace the original acoustic funnels that the earliest models had employed.

•   And then came Amplification technology—invented three decades after the first telephones and phonographs—which further upgraded both of those older inventions. 

•   In fact, the sciences related to sound improved greatly because of the invention of the phonograph as much as the other way around. 

•   [pause]

•   An article in the journal of the Kansas Academy of Science from 1888 illustrates that point. It demonstrates that knowledge of the ear had progressed greatly in the previous ten years, thanks in no small part to the phonograph.

•   [QE]“…[W]e are possessed, for the first time, of the means for making a complete scientific analysis of speech, and may hope to make record of this fugitive aerial movement, which has hitherto been lost like the track of a vessel through the sea…”

•   Hey, that’s pretty poetic for a scientist.

•   The point is that the ability to bottle sound allowed it for the first time to be studied under consistent conditions.

•   [pause]

•   Scientists, engineers and industrialists had to catch up with the phonograph before it could be made useful.

•   Once they did catch up, the phonograph went from being an obscure laboratory prototype—to an essential piece of household furniture.

•   That process not only changed how individuals thought about the novelty of bottled sound—it also allowed new sounds to travel to new places for the first time ever, making the world feel a little smaller in the process.

•   [Separator music]

Phonographs around the globe

•   In 1896, Edison greatly improved his device and he started calling this new model “the perfected phonograph”—even though it still had a lot of perfecting left to do.

•   After this year, phonographs and phonographic recordings became increasingly commercially available. [AudioTech_Phonograph-ScientificAmerican1896(jstor).pdf]

•   With larger audiences of listeners came new challenges—like figuring out what kinds of sounds people wanted to preserve in the first place.

•   Here, for instance, is a 1913 recording of a Common Nightingale, recorded and published by the Victor Talking Machine Company.

•   [play recording]

•   Maybe I should have called this episode [whisper] “You hear dead birds.”

•   And here’s a bit from another avian-themed record called “How Birds Sing.”

•   It’s by a remarkably talented man named Charles Kellogg.

•   [Play excerpt where he says that scientists say his throat developed in a way that’s “identical to that of a bird.”—Then plan a couple of short excerpts.]

•     [pause]

•   Huh. I strongly suspect that scientists would disagree with that statement, but okay, let’s keep listening.

•   [play birdsong]

•   Maybe I should have called this episode [whisper] “You hear dead people imitating dead birds.”

•    

•   [pause]

•   Meanwhile, as phonographs became more available, birds—as well as bird-wannabees—were not the only ones getting recorded for posterity.

•   Phonographs also began to record people. And worse still—politicians—who, as the Times had predicted, figured out that they could send recordings of themselves to public speaking engagements instead of having to go places in person.

•   In this recording, the Vice President of the United States Garrett Hobart comments in his words of welcome to the Electrical Exposition of 1898 in New York City—on how amazing—but also how weird—it is to be so far from Washington DC but still able to send his recorded voice 250 miles down the road.

•   [From mp3 AudioTech_Phonograph-GarrettHobart-USVeep(1898).mp3:  “what I have to say is insignificant compared to the impressive fact that the electrical genius of our age has made possible this marvelous system of communication which annihilates time and space and distance.”

•   [pause]

•   And phonographs would carry voices over much further distances than the comparatively short journey between the Big Apple and the Big D.C.

•   Records and their players started to travel the globe for the first time. And with them came new questions about how recorded sound would impact people’s lives.

•   For example, I’m looking now at a 2018 academic journal article by a Dutch scholar named Jan Just Witkam, about an early 20th century debate within Islamic law.

•   One of the specific issues they took on was what to make of phonographic recordings of people reading the Quran—the holy book of the Islamic faith—whether listening to them was a pious act, or blasphemy, or something in between.

•   Legal scholars throughout the Islamic world weighed in on the issue. Jurists in Indonesia, in the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, and in Turkey, all asked critical questions.

•   Are the new recordings to be treated like books? Are they like actual human speakers of Quranic texts? Or do they require some other interpretation?

•   In Islam when an individual recites Quranic texts for the purpose of prayer, Muslims are required to bow down deeply—to prostrate themselves. Does playing a recording of a Quranic recitation carry that same obligation?

•   As with all legal scholars, these folks disagreed with one another.

•   But by the 1920s, a general consensus emerged that recordings of people reciting from the Quran were not the same as a living individual engaged in recitation. For that reason, prostrating oneself for a recording was not necessary.

•   And the jurists deemed the recordings themselves fine, so long as the reciter making the recording had good intentions, spreading and maintaining the word of God for the Muslim community—as opposed to recording for profit, or for simple recreation.

•   The author of this academic article concludes that

•   “[QE] It would be rare for a modern-day Muslim to ask whether reproducing recitation of the Quran is permitted since it is ubiquitous—in the taxi, in the barbershop, in teahouses and restaurants, Quranic recital has become a familiar sound.”

•   The writer concludes that CDs, DVDs and cassettes with quoted Quranic passages are everywhere.

•   In terms of present-day digital downloads, I just searched on YouTube and the first hit I got was a ten hour video of continuous Quranic recitation.

•   Many hundreds or possibly thousands—I didn’t count them all—of other similar videos followed.

•   So yep, it appears confirmed that this issue has been at least mostly resolved.

•   [pause]

•   One of the reasons that the phonograph spread so quickly to the Islamic world and beyond, was that it was actively promoted by Edison and those who came after him, as a globally significant invention. 

•   That is, once they became affordable for consumers with moderate incomes, manufacturers and merchants wanted to sell them as far and widely as possible.

•   Meeting that objective included not just selling the players. It also involved recording people and music in many different languages from all over the world.

•   Music in particular expanded in scope. Musical styles got mixed up and re-mixed-up in all kinds of new ways.

•   Instruments and genres that had been local to some places spread to new places; so did the specific tunes that people played.

•   [pause]

•   Sometimes you didn’t have to travel very far to find new sources of musical inspiration.

•   For instance, the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok who lived from 1881–1945 took a phonograph into his country’s rural areas and asked peasants to sing their traditional folk tunes into the machine.

•   In the process, he became one of the first ethnomusicologists—a person who studies the interrelationship between music and culture.

•   That is, even during his research in his home country of Hungary, he found an entire population whose traditional music had been ignored by other composers.

•   As a response, Bartok incorporated these folk songs into his classical musical compositions and got people all around the world searching for their own people’s folk melodies.

•   [pause]

•   And recorded sound injected new life into other forms of music too. 

•   It allowed some musicians to gain larger-than-ever audiences, turning them into the first mega-recording-stars in the process.

•   [pause]

•   For example, the historian Laura Fair highlights the rise of the mega-pop-star-sensation named Siti Binti Saad—a singing legend born around the same year as Bartok and who lived to 1950.

•   She was born into slavery on the island of Zanzibar, today part of the country of Tanzania in east Africa.

•   Some lightning-fast context here: Europeans had been the biggest participants in the mass system of human trafficking called the transatlantic slave trade from the end of the 16th century through the start of the 19th century.

•   But by 1800, European governments began to reconsider the trade’s morality—just at about the same time as the system became less economically viable—probably not a coincidence.

•   Then in the later years of the 19th century, European governments put pressure on other governments around the globe to end slavery.

•   For that reason, in 1897, Zanzibar, which had been a major hub of the east African slave trade, finally ended the institution altogether under pressure from the British.

•   The point is that Siti Binti Saad, though freed when Zanzibar abolished slavery in 1897, still came from about as humble a background as one could come from.

•   She eventually found opportunity as a small-time seller of pottery.

•   And as she went around trying to sell her wares, she would sing.

•   Her singing voice gained a reputation for being both beautiful and powerful—and her lyrics garnered attention for being especially clever. 

•   Singing soon became her main gig and she became fluent in multiple musical styles.

•   To this day, she’s considered perhaps the greatest voice of a Zanzibari musical genre called taarab.

•   The lyrics she sang sometimes had an irreverent streak toward those in positions of wealth and power.

•   At the same time, she also managed to gain a more formal religious education for herself, and learned how to sing passages from the Quran in Arabic—the recording of which was already becoming commonplace.

•   Her legendary voice and her ability to appeal to both poor and wealthy listeners, got her invited to the richest homes and palaces in Zanzibar.

•   It was during one of those performances that a well-connected patron arranged for her and her band to go to Bombay in British-controlled India, to record her music on to the new disk-playing phonographs made by the Gramophone Company.

•   Over the next years, she and her band cut something like 130 records and sold them throughout the huge Kiswahili-speaking region of eastern Africa, and throughout the entire Indian Ocean trading basin.

•   You can listen to her recorded voice to this day on major digital labels as well, including Apple Music and YouTube, among others.

•   I’ll throw up some links on findyourselfinhistory.com if you’re interested.

•   [pause]

•   For Siti Binti Saad, the phonograph allowed her to share her formidable vocal talents with a much broader audience than would have been possible through just live performance.

•   In this sense, this superstar was part of an even larger trend that brought new common listening experiences to the human species.

•   [separator music]

Conclusion

•   Phonographs and related recording technologies changed humanity. 

•   They allowed listeners to access voices we never could have heard in a single lifetime.

•   Those voices traveled further through both space and time than ever before.

•   People’s songs and speech could go further than had been possible; Hungarian peasants, authors, poets, public speakers, Christian and Muslim clergy, and East African superstars, all gained larger audiences than could have been conceived of in earlier eras.

•   And their voices transcended death itself.

•   Today, we can listen to Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon or Siti Binti Saad—even a bird that’s been dead for a century. This is an ability that human beings simply never had before 1877—a relatively recent year in the big picture of human history.

•   Recording technologies separated us and our recent predecessors from the shared limits that used to characterize the ability of our species to communicate.

•   [pause]

•   It also redefined our relationship to technology, making it more intimate than ever before; our machines literally started talking to us.

•   [pause]

•   And we started talking back, too.

•   Speaking to the phonograph as if it were a real talking person was not limited to people without knowledge of the device’s workings.

•   According to one journalist who spent a day with Thomas Edison way back in 1878, the year after the phonograph’s invention, Edison himself would occasionally exchange words with the invention in its early stages:

•   [QE] “…[W]hen he shouts to it : ‘Well, old Phonograph! How are you getting on down there?’ and it answers back in its grumbling or spiteful metallic tones, it is difficult to rid one’s self of the notion that there is indeed an elfish personality there which has its own views of things and must be considered in its feelings.”

•   This isn’t to suggest that Edison or this journalist actually believed it would answer back in any novel or creative way; it’s like someone asking their phone’s AI assistant a question that you know it can’t answer:

•   [play Logic file “SiriConversationForEp3” “Siri, are you smarter than an 1877 phonograph?” etc.]

•   [pause]

•   Edison would have killed to get a ‘sure thing’ out of his device.

•   [pause]

•   That’s a good start for sure, but let’s try something a little smarter:

•   I’ll strike up a conversation with ChatGPT, a cutting edge piece of software from the Open AI project.

•   For its voice, we’ll use one of my Mac’s British accents in honor of Sir Arth—

•   [Sullivan voice Interrupting] “Arthur Sullivan”

•   Yes—right sorry. I keep forgetting:

•   In honor of Arthur Sullivan.

•   [longish pause]

•   Well Old Chatbot! How are you getting on down there?

•   [Mac text to speech, reading] As an artificial intelligence, I don't have feelings or physical sensations like humans do, so I don't experience "getting on" in the same way that you do. I exist to assist users like you by providing information and answering questions to the best of my ability. Is there something specific you would like to know or discuss?

•    

•   [me] Yes there is, now that you mention it.

•   [me] Are you smarter than an 1877 phonograph?

•   [Mac text to speech, reading] It's difficult to compare my intelligence to that of an 1877 phonograph, as a phonograph is a mechanical device that was designed to record and play back sound. It doesn't have the ability to think or learn in the way that I do as an artificial intelligence. However, I can certainly process and analyze information more quickly and accurately than a phonograph, as well as perform a much wider range of tasks.

•   [pause]

•   Definitely a much better answer.

•   Almost sounds—alive…

--

Outro & teaser

•   [Start outro music]

•   For our next episode: What hot beverage do you think of when you imagine someone from England?

•   That’s right, it’s tea. But how did this leaf become British when it grows in far-away places like India and China? The answer has something to do with empires—sugar.

•   Tune in to find out why that seemingly innocent teabag of yours may have come with strings attached.

•   [pause]

•   All citations for historical documents, audio clips, and other resources in this episode may be found on findyourselfinhistory.com . You can also learn more about what the late Sir Arthur Sullivan was actually trying to say to the world in his recording at findyourselfinhistory.com .

•   Check it out!

•   This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2022 Doug Sofer. The theme song was also written by Doug Sofer and performed by Doug Sofer on lead guitar and bass with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

•   Thanks for listening!