Around the World November 1, 2011
NEW JERSEY: Sometimes an artifact isn't a pot or a skull, but a woman singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" to a child. Scientists recovered the unidentified voice from a tin phonograph record that would have been part of a 123-year-old talking doll. Because the record, made by Thomas Edison, was bent, it was optically scanned to make a digital model of the recorded surface. Edison's talking dolls, an early attempt to commercialize his phonograph, never found a market.
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