Ghost Voices

Gouraud, agent of my choice, Bid my balance sheets rejoice; Send me Mr. Gladstone's voice.

Some ten years after the late Thomas Alva Edison first recorded the human voice* on tinfoil in 1877, he sent the foregoing jingly "phonogram," on a wax cylinder, to Colonel George E. Gouraud in London.

Gouraud got Gladstone's voice, in a wordy tribute to Edison, and the voices of a host of others in London around that period--Florence Nightingale, Sir Henry Irving, Phineas Taylor Barnum. Edison's staffs elsewhere recorded hundreds of others. But within a few years the gramophone industry had become too preoccupied with ragtime and Uncle Josh to stick to the course Edison had plotted for it.

Last week, however, thanks to 20 years of rummaging by an enthusiastic Manhattan hobbyist named Robert Vincent, every town and hamlet within range of 34 local radio stations in the U. S. and several in Australia, might have heard the voices that Edison and others recorded speaking scratchily from the past. Set in modern, radio-dramatized transcriptions under titles like Voices of Yesterday, History Speaks, etc., the old recordings recapture moments calculated to stir the memories of oldsters and give youngsters shivery earfuls from beyond the grave.

Robert Vincent is 39. as a boy learned to record by doing chores around the old Edison studios in Manhattan. He lived for a time in Oyster Bay, where he got to know the late Theodore Roosevelt. His first recording was of Theodore Roosevelt's voice, greeting Vincent's Boy Progressives League on March 4, 1913, while Woodrow Wilson was being inaugurated President after outrunning Bull Mooser Roosevelt and Republican William Howard Taft. Said Teddy to the young Bull Moosers with unsquelched heartiness and bite: "Don't flinch, don't foul, and hit the line hard."

Most thrilling record: Kenneth Landfrey, a trumpeter for the Light Brigade, sounding again in 1890 the tragic charge at Balaclava in 1854.

Most moving: The words of Florence Nightingale at 70, shrill, wavering, full of emotion: "When I am no longer even a memory--just a name--I hope my voice brings to history the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore."

Other good bits:

P. T. Barnum: "My voice, like my great show . . . will be heard centuries after I have joined the great, and as I believe, happy majority."

Ambassador James W. Gerard after his recall from Germany in 1917: "The Foreign Minister of Germany once said to me: 'Your country does not dare to do anything against Germany, because we have in your country 500,000 German reservists who will rise in arms against your Government if you dare to make a move against Germany.' Well, I told him that that might be so, but that we had 501,000 lamp posts in this country, and that that was where the reservists would be hanging the day after they tried to rise. . . ."

Other recorded voices of yesterday: Kaiser Franz Josef, Queen Victoria, Woodrow Wilson, Mark Twain, Henry Morton Stanley, President Taft, William Jennings Bryan, Rear-Admiral Peary, Ellen Terry, James Whitcomb Riley, Vice-President (to President McKinley) Garret A. Hobart. Hobbyist Vincent is now searching for a known recording of the voice of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, famed uxoricide.

*His own, reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb.

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