Thanks for watching everyone! When I'm not tracking down bits of of lost films, I work as a cine technician, digitising both commercial and domestic cine films at this digitisation lab in Norwich, UK: eachmoment.co.uk We also do video tapes, audio reel, audio cassettes, photographs, slides and more! Check us out -- and if you use my code OLDFILMS at checkout you get a 10% discount. The original soundtrack for this film is missing so I added a piece of music that share's it's title.
For those are skeptical since the guy in the audio said the year, it's standard for people to put dates on their projects, just like how it's standard for you to sign the date for anything nowadays.
its not weird at all. is standard practice when documenting scientific experiments and your findings. you ALWAYS say/write what the current date is so that records will be accurate for future refrencing.
@@orion7741 no, im aware of that. But the fact that we are listening to someone regard 1885 as “right now” is kinda crazy to me, probably because we’re used to hearing about these dates in a historical context.
Additional reasons include but are not limited to: the recording degrading with age, meaning it was understandable a century ago. Everything that was said being written down, for later comparison to the audio recording.
It really wasn’t, people just hear what they want to. Subtitle a muffled sound that seems convincing and everyone will believe it’s what the subtitle says.
It’s great to have stuff like this that gives us the human aspect of history. The way we learn history is so dull and it makes it hard to not think of history as a distant universe full of names until you really think about the peoples lives and try to think about what it would’ve been like to be there.
I love stuff like this. It shows the human side of history; those people weren't flat colorless images or names with dates and deeds attached, they were people, just like us; they lived, ate, drank, fell in love, suffered, and got frustrated at machines malfunctioning and said, "Oh fuck!"
This changed my perspective on the past. Literally. I can hear the happiness and humor in his voice. He sounds so alive. I don't think of old pictures of black and white people anymore. I see them as humans, like us alive.
I'm an archaeologist, everyday we find things that just prove this true. A kid's handprint in adobe wall when it was wet, broken toys in what was once the wood s at that time period, a box of archaic spear points in a19th century privy, or my favorite a Clovis point broken putting the last flute down the center. I always imagined the maker after spending 20/30 minutes making this beautiful blade shaping it to be symmetrical for even flight about ready to put the last flake in before fitting it to a spear shaft....... And snapping it in half, muttering the paleoindian word for fuck and throwing it as far from where they were sitting as possible. There is no sign on that point they tried making that into any other tool which was common just said to hell with it. I wood work in my spare time....... I may have done that a time or two. Spend hours cutting, sanding about ready to stain it AAAaaand something happens. Across my yard it goes!
@@L0NGG0NE766I know right.. it's weird to me for someone to even think that. Even when I was younger, I'd try to imagine every old picture/video in color because I guess i knew that the past wasn't any different than ours visually. And that people were indeed just people like us just with different technologies/clothes etc.
he can't imagine we heard his sound 130 years later edit: sorry for my bad english i mean ''He can't imagine the way we are hearing his voice 130 years later''
this recording was actually made photographically on a light sensitive glass plate. and you cant place a needle on a flat glass plate and hear something from it.
same here. its such a weird feeling as it shoves the fact that "time/history" exists right in my face. There's proof. I know time exists, and I think about it but you don't usually think about it and feel the realness of it all. It's scary to me, to think that we've been on earth for this long. We were actually able to create devices that record ourselves even if we are dead for hundreds and hundreds of years. A capsule of time itself, it's so amazing to me.
Just as the 80s are somehow not 20-something years ago anymore, the 1880s aren't still 120-something years ago any more. Time flies brother, half of the 80s is 40 or more years ago now!
It's so strange hearing someone actually say "in the year eighteen fifty five", like it's so strange hearing that, imagine in 200 years people hear us say, "it is the year 2023"
I honestly don’t think it would be anywhere near as special. This is particularly groundbreaking because we have little if any other type of audio recordings from this period, and it’s also an example of someone talking in a colloquial and vulgar way (if only for a split second) from that long ago. Assuming civilization as we know it doesn’t fall apart, people in 200 years will have access to well over a trillion high quality video (not just audio) recordings of things we couldn’t even dream of seeing and hearing from this time period.
@@bluesmusicandwhatnot2845 I don't believe that. No technology in our register will allow anything from the past to correctly be heard ro fixed. It's not like we can unburn documents.
Iconic that the first dude to ever say the word "fuck" on record literally had the word "taint" in his name, meaning this is technically the first recording of both words.
Shit, everyone in your family having kids at 12? My great-great-great-great-great-great-Grandad was born c. 1720. This would be my great-grandfather's toddler days. I'm not even 20.
I love how listening to someone 140 years ago for us is absolutely crazy. But in a few hundred years the time between the first recording of human voice and the high quality mics of today is going to seem like a blink in history. History teacher in 2600: “here’s a recording from 600 years ago” *perfectly audible* “now here’s one from 700 years ago” *barely able to make out sentences*
Given the amount of media from the early internet age that is completely lost, and how quickly and easily copies degrade, I wouldn't be surprised if current records became extremely rare and hardly understandable 600 years from now. To say nothing of companies enforcing copyright so hard that the original recordings get destroyed and only bootleg copies survive. Like, there's tv episodes from little over a decade ago that aren't available in their original broadcast version, anywhere on earth. There are episodes or even shows that straight up don't exist anywhere anymore, in any version. I'm pretty sure the recording in this video was much more audible back when it was made, but time and use have degraded it. RU-vid compression has degraded it a little, and every time it gets reposted from now on it's going to get even more degraded.
This has given me an absolutely absurd amount of joy. Mister Sumner Tainter: you, your awesome last name, and your wonderful recorded curse, are my favorite things right now. (I’ve watched this like fifteen times now.)
I think it was actually Harry G. Rogers who recorded it. On the website listed, there are some other Volta Laboratories recordings from H.G. Rogers who had the same voice.
Thanks for posting. F'ing awesome! My only regret is that so much material like this has been lost. Silent movies destroyed for the silver nitrate. What treasures gone.
@@rng4612 but yeah it is pretty darn cool that we can hear recordings this old! they could've never imagined the internet or even computers considering electricity was pretty new at the time
This is so majestic this inspired me to start a family, make a business, and talk to a woman for the first time I hope others can hear this absolute masterpiece
Remember that even at the time, this was not the best way of recording. This recording was most likely done as an experiment, with a stylus attached to a diaphragm causing variations in the width of a narrow slit through which light was passing, creating a trace of uniform width but variable density. This was an experiment on techniques to mass-produce records. Of course, since the Edison phonograph was already widely available since the 1890s, I wouldn’t be surprised if someday a cylinder is found of a child recording profanities whilst his parents were not home.
@Deadfish King looking at videos on RU-vid they seem to have sounded no different to us today other than changes in accents in recent years. But the general pattern of speech was no different going back to the early 1800s at least. The trouble with literature is that it is mostly idealistic and flowery or the interpretation of an outsider so very rarely can be relied on.
Charles Sumner Tainter (April 25, 1854 - April 20, 1940) was an American scientific instrument maker, engineer and inventor, best known for his collaborations with Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, Alexander's father-in-law Gardiner Hubbard, and for his significant improvements to Thomas Edison's phonograph, resulting in the Graphophone, one version of which was the first Dictaphone. Later in his career Tainter was associated with the International Graphopone Company of West Virginia, and also managed his own research and development laboratory, earning him the title: 'Father Of The Talking Machine' (i.e.: father of the phonograph).
It’s insane how this recording is still somewhat audible. It’s a big reminder that if you’ve got something of somewhat importance like an old photo or an old home recording, make sure it’s in a safe spot and be very carful with it. Who knows, your VHS tape could show up on Space Channel 5 100 years from now as the last remaining working VHS
After another 140 years these analog things and cave paintings from the start of humanity will still exist and most of our the current year digital things will be gone forever.
@@Pentti_HilkuriNot optical media, though. M-Disc blurays will probably (we can't know for sure, obviously, but tests seem to indicate it) for thousands of years and even normal blurays can very likely last more than a century.
@Pentti_Hilkuri except for the fact that a lot of the analog data mediums have an expiry date. VHS tapes, audio tapes, CDs, DVDs, even Blu-Rays have an expiry date.
did you live 100 years in the future? you literally can't know that. you're assuming because it "sounds" right. ignorance makes people think they are smarter than they are.@@MrScottyTay
@@RainyFox-ot9qn ??? He's not wrong, most analog data storage devices _do_ degrade. For DVDs and Blu-Rays it really depends on what the disk is made of, but your typical DVD or Blu-Ray will last somewhere between 5-50 years. In other words, most DVDs and Blu-Rays existing in current day will _not_ be working 100 years in the future, although some will -- mostly by special manufacturing techniques but some by sheer luck. Source: the Canadian Conservation Institute
You guys need to stop having access to phrases you don't know the meaning of. What the fuck would be odd about something from the past being funny EVEN TODAY? Even today, huhuh, like today's the dominator of what's funny.
@@WitchKing-Of-Angmar it is. most humour used by people 138 years ago is stuff the average person wouldn't find funny anymore, because humour changes over time. this is an exception of that.
Kinda. At the time, and for over 100 years if I'm not mistaken, there was no way to listen to this, as it was recorded as a waveform printed on to glass. This was also one of if not the earliest ever recording, at least that can be heard or reproduced in modern times. Technically, there is possibly an older set of recordings, but they have never been found or confirmed to have existed, and even if they did exist, there is a pretty good chance that they have been destroyed.
I can't help thinking of 1885 as old and stuffy with top hats and horse drawn carriages, old ornate wooden furniture and people writing with quills (The ball point pen was invented in 1888 btw). But of course for those living there and then it was just the same as us living today, in the moment. Their furniture and carriages didn't seem old fashioned because they weren't. It was literally modern times for them. How we live now will seem really old fashioned in 135 years time.
Man didn't know that in the future people would deliberately lower the quality of their microphones just to sound like him, because our broken generation finds it funny.
@Elijah Jackson Wow! I had no idea. I assumed at thos time it was still new. I assume cursing was seen as taboo most of its existence which is why we think of it as a new word.
they did not actually use the "F" word back then. they did not say it in this recording either. you think they say it because the words on the screen, but if you close your eyes and listen, you can clearly hear for yourself that they never said anything even remotely close to the "F" word.
@@orion7741 “fuck” has been around since like the 1600s, it’s cognate with some Germanic words but slang terms tend to be hard to trace so we don’t know much more. Anyway, you’re extremely wrong. “Fuck” is as old to the people in this recording as the recording is to us.
This is the biggest fucking mood, what a guy. Somehow this more than anything warms my heart, to sit in 2022 and hear this man fuck up and swear on the recording- maybe he tripped on something, or somehow forgot the next line to Mary Had A Little Lamb. Either way, I feel that human experience in my soul, mate, and thank you for preserving the evidence for us.
Remind me to never meet you mr judge a book by its cover. And he said "Ohh nuts" not "oh fuck". Stars in the 1900s-30s were saying "son of a gun" and "oh nuts" or just "nuts!"
