80 Year Old Edison Recording Uncovered

embolalia writes: An 80 year old recording of a live radio broadcast featuring Thomas Edison has been uncovered. The recording was done on an obscure technology called a pallophotophone — Greek for "shaking light sound" — that uses optical film to reproduce sound. The archivists who uncovered the canisters tucked away on a bottom shelf in a museum in Schenectady, New York (the city where Edison's General Electric was founded), did not have any machine to replay the films. A pair of GE engineers were able to construct a machine to replay the 80 year old tapes, recored only two years before Edison's death.