Accessibility links
Lost & Found Sound NPR's Lost & Found Sound series explores newly discovered audio and music sessions, home audio, and listener submitted sounds and interviews. Subscribe to the RSS feed of never before played audio and sounds.

Lost & Found Sound

Center of the World

NPR's year-long Friday collaboration with independent producers Jay Allison and the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) -- a series called LOST AND FOUND SOUND. Today we present an item from our QUEST FOR SOUND, in which listeners call 202-408-0300 and tell us about recordings they have - or have stumbled upon. Reverend Dwight Frizzell of Kansas City, Missouri found a recording of the late President Harry S. Truman from 1957 -- five years after Truman left office. The tape is of Truman dedicating a shopping center to be built on the site of his boyhood home. With music Frizzell and a friend added, this remarkable speech winds up being a powerful, and unintended elegy to a passing era.

Center of the World

Only Available in Archive Formats.

Eyewitness at Gettysburg

Quest for Sound curator Jay Allison has unearthed a unique recording: the voice of William V. Rathvon, who as a nine-year-old boy, watched and listened to Abraham Lincoln deliver his address at Gettysburg in November 1863. The story was told in 1938 and recorded on a 78 r.p.m. record. We will air a 5-6 minute excerpt. This item came to us as a result of our QUEST HOTLINE 202-408-0300. A family in Pallatine, Illinois had this recording to share with us. Rathvon was a distant relative. No other Gettysburg eyewitness is known to have recorded their memories on record.

Eyewitness at Gettysburg

Only Available in Archive Formats.

Dead Media

As our Friday feature, Lost and Found Sounds continues, NPR's Dan Charles visits Dave Morton, a New Jersey man who saves technology for sound recording that came .. and went. We learn about the dictabelts, the wire recorders, the other odd devices that captured sound besides phonographs and tape. We hear Oscar Hammerstein dictating notes on a show, soldiers in the Pacific singing, and samples of eight-track tapes.

Dead Media

Only Available in Archive Formats.

Lost and Found Sound

Independent producers The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, continue their story about the man who invented the phonograph. This is part of the Friday feature called "Lost and Found Sound." After Edison invented the talking machine, other people experimented and advanced his ideas, and then competed to sell machines and recordings. Edison stuck with the cylinder, while others preferred the flat disc, which became the industry standard. Edison hated the disk. He didn''t like the two-sided ones, because he felt he could have sold TWO recordings if there was only one-song per disk. The Wizard of Menlo Park suffered from his judgments and his distractions. He spent eight critical years away from work on improving the phonograph to follow up on the electric light. When he returned, musical tastes had changed. The other companies had signed big artists. Edison preferred less flashy music and was notoriously cheap with payments to artists. For all these reasons, Edison failed at the record business.

Lost and Found Sound

Only Available in Archive Formats.

Lost And Found Sound: Edison

PART 1 -- Independent producers The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) continue our year-long series (which airs every Friday in 1999 on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED) with part one of a profile of the work of Thomas Alva Edison in the realm of recorded sound. We learn that the inventor of the phonograph intended his instrument to be used to capture speeches and office dictation. Only later did he record music for the public. Skeptics were in disbelief of the phonograph when it first appeared, that they suspected Edison of hiring ventriloquists to copy voices. Edison, the "Wizard of Menlo Park" (named after the site of his first New Jersey laboratory), was a huge public figure of his day. He held over a thousand patents, but considered the phonograph his most important invention. Part Two, next Friday, continues the story with how Edison faced competition in the record industry.

Lost And Found Sound: Edison

Only Available in Archive Formats.