The Otto von Bismarck Foundation of Germany has a record of a Bismarck recording, but, having searched for it for years, had given up hope of finding it. The wax cylinder, as it turned out, was stored in a box of 17 such cylinders that had been found in a cabinet in Edison's New Jersey home in 1957, but scientists did not have the right tools to play the sounds locked inside. Chaz Firestone profiled Feaster, and glossed his method, here in The Atlantic:

To free the recording's voice, Feaster commissioned a high-resolution scan from the Library of Congress and then brought out the big guns: An experimental method he developed on his own by co-opting software that converts bands of varying width into playable sound, reverse engineering the age-old practice of drawing and scratching on a film soundtrack to create sound for animation. Optical film soundtracks vary a sound's specified amplitude by letting in more or less light, so Feaster edits the grooves and traces he wants to play back to make them look like optical film soundtracks, which the software easily converts into sound.

Wangemann postcard to Edison, from Berlin, 1890. NPS

It wasn't until last year that Feaster and Puille figured out that one of the cylinders contained the lost Bismarck recording. The box bore one clue: It was labeled "Wangemann. Edison." -- a reference to Theo Wangemann's, the world's first-ever professional sound recordist, who, in 1889 and 1890, traveled around Europe at Edison's behest to exhibit the new recording technology. Edison would send him blank cylinders -- 2,400 and 4,000 of them during the duration of his trip -- on which to record music, voices, and possibly plays as well.

When the researchers first heard the Bismarck recording, they did not know what it was. As the Times reports:

Mr. Puille, the sound historian in Berlin, said it was not easy to identify Bismarck's voice. But after he deciphered a reference to Friedrichsruh, Bismarck's estate, in the announcement of one of the cylinders, "I immediately knew that I was on the right track," he continued in an e-mail message. "Bismarck's name is not mentioned in the recording, but I had collected all available information about his cylinder in the contemporary press, and the content of the cylinder matched perfectly." He added, "No doubt this find is the culmination of my researcher's life."

On the cylinder, Bismarck recites bits of poetry in English, German, French, and Latin. (A complete transcription is available here.)

Many of the recordings have been damaged over the years, and the quality is not wonderful. But the recordings are a reminder of the utter uniqueness of our own time, when documentation -- audio, visual, textual -- is ubiquitous, and the voices of our leaders are replayed over and over again.