Come back to us when all that the Greco-Roman pottery can have the micro vibrations ridges on them read as sound. How much you wanna bet we hear a few hummed bars of Unchained Melody.

There was an article about this in the New York Times. Among the audio clips recovered were a Stephen Foster mix tape, a noisy neighbor yelling "shut up, little man!" and Bell pretending to host his own radio show.

I had to listen to it a few times to hear anything, then I had an "oh, fuck" moment...

Carlene Stephens can be my curator any time.

If this is "for the first time," then are we to assume that it didn't work for Bell when he tried to play it back?

He probably misconfigured the IRQs. I hated screwing with that stuff back in the days of the original Doom.

These were after Edison's famous 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' I believe. If this was in the 1880s, then wax cylinders were already out to some degree, but this was the point where phonograph records were being invented. Likely, Bell was trying to invent the first phonograph - but unfortunately he did not.

Believe it or not, the first recorded voices were before Edison's time - and here's an example from as far back as 1860:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2swf_KPVc8

And here is the earliest known music recording:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1mxG5JuqGo

And here is Sousa conducting "The Darkies Temptation" in 1896:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7_6U_K2s0

Too bad Tainter isn't better known. People might have started calling records "taints." Hey, want to come over to my house and listen to some taints?

Among the early recordings: Bell making a call to Watson, asking him if a Haywood Jablome was there, then giggling like a little girl.