SCHENECTADY — It is an American treasure that had been suspended in time for more than a century.

Locked in silence for 134 years, the earliest known recording of a musical performance and a human voice, preserved on a Thomas Edison tinfoil, was retrieved from historical obscurity by two dogged archivists, an experimental physicist and leading edge 3-D imaging equipment.

The 5-inch by 15-inch strip of tinfoil was scored with a series of dots by a stylus on a rotating cylinder. Slightly more than a minute long, the recording includes a short cornet solo, a man reciting nursery rhymes and interludes of laughter. It was recorded during a public sales demonstration of Edison's recording phonograph device in St. Louis on June 22, 1878.

The fragile tinfoil, folded and stored in an envelope, was donated by the daughter of a Michigan antiques dealer in 1978 to the Schenectady Museum, now called miSci, short for the Museum of Innovation and Science.

The recording was played Thursday night at the GE Theatre at Proctors during a presentation sponsored by miSci.

There had been no way to listen to it without shredding the delicate tinfoil until a painstaking retrieval and digitizing process was undertaken over the summer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California. The work was made possible by a $25,000 Save America's Treasure grant.

The project mated an obsolete mechanical apparatus with state-of-the-art digital technology.

"It's pretty phenomenal. This was the first time music and voices were recorded and played back, and we can now hear it, as well as the audience reaction," said John Schneiter, a museum trustee and former GE Co. engineer who holds 16 patents.

"It's an exciting combination of using modern technology to recapture the past," said museum archivist Chris Hunter.

Schneiter and Hunter teamed up in 2010 to create a device that could play one of the world's oldest surviving radio broadcasts from an obscure recording on a GE device known as a pallophotophone. It included a sickly, 82-year-old Thomas Edison praising his good friend Henry Ford and was recorded on Oct. 21, 1929.

"That success spurred me to keep trying," Hunter said.

They enlisted Carl Haber, a physicist at the Berkeley laboratory. Hunter carried the precious cargo by hand on a flight to California.

Haber used a 3-D image scanning device that recorded eight hours of extremely high-resolution data that rendered the two-dimensional tinfoil into the equivalent of a topographical map.

The series of dots made by the Edison machine, if laid end to end, would have stretched for more than a football field. The scanner measured dots at depths of 100 microns, roughly equivalent to four human hairs. It was then translated into digitized sound by a sophisticated computer software program. It's similar to an imaging process used today in a variety of applications: by dentists making crowns, by GE for imaging turbine blades and by Apple for quality assurance of the glass display on iPhones.

"It's ironic that we rode a technology wave to give us a window into the genesis of recordings and the information age," Haber said.

"Recording yourself on your smartphone or computer is so easy today we don't even think about it," Schneiter said. "Back then, it had never been done before. To record sound and also reproduce it was remarkable."

Only a few hundred Edison tinfoil recording phonographs were sold. It wasn't a practical technology because the tinfoil could be played only a few times before being ruined.

The Edison tinfoil machines sold for $10 to $95 in 1878 — equal to about $1,000 to $9,500 in today's dollars. They were marketed to the affluent late 19th-century audiophile at a time when a worker's typical daily wage was 60 cents.

The recording is scratchy, filled with static and thumps at the sections where the tinfoil was folded. But the human emotion and sense of wonder come through.

There are short bursts of laughter and even a flubbed line. A fellow recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and followed that with "Old Mother Hubbard," but he made a mistake and ad-libbed: "Look at me. I don't know the song."

That drew more laughs.

"It was the first recorded blooper," Hunter said.

pgrondahl@timesunion.com