Want to hear the world's first blooper?
You can, along with the oldest recording of an American voice and the first-ever recording of a musical performance. It is now digital, not on tinfoil. The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.
The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man's voice reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard." The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme. "Look at me; I don't know the song," he says.
Yes, the world's first musical performance recording also contains the first gag reel attempt. Those guys in "Smokey and The Bandit" were carrying on a long and proud tradition.
The recording was made on a sheet of tinfoil, 5 inches wide by 15 inches long, placed on the cylinder of the phonograph Edison invented in 1877 and began selling the following year. Only a handful of the tinfoil recording sheets are known to known to survive, and of those, only two are playable: the Schenectady museum's and an 1880 recording owned by The Henry Ford museum in Michigan.
Other recovered projects the team have done include recovering a snippet of a folk song recorded a capella in 1860 on paper by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, the French printer credited with inventing the earliest known sound recording device.
Soundtrack to history: 1878 Edison audio unveiled by Chris Carola, Associated Press
