So what else exists from before 1888? If we exclude recordings that weren't intended for playback or to be permanently playable, then the oldest sound recordings preserved today are found at the National Museum of American History -- experimental phonograms made starting in 1881 by the Volta Laboratory Association, which consisted of telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell, scientific instrument maker Charles Sumner Tainter, and chemist Chichester A. Bell.

With the support of a Lemelson Center Fellowship and the help of curator Carlene Stephens, I carried out a study of early sound recordings at the Museum, including the Volta materials, between October and December 2011. By comparing artifacts from the Volta collection with experiments described in notebooks at the Museum and the Library of Congress, I was able to identify a number of unlabeled items. One of these -- a small copper disc with a laterally modulated or "zig-zag" sound recording -- turned out to have been prepared shortly before October 20, 1881, to test whether electrically depositing a layer of metal on a recorded wax disc, and then using the metal negative to stamp out copies, might work as a basis for duplication in a future recording industry. "In this way a piece of music, for instance, can be recorded once," Tainter had speculated, "and any number of copies made from this original record, and the music reproduced from each of the copies."

The October 1881 date makes this one of the oldest known American sound recordings in existence, so a question naturally arises: What's on it? The written documentation I could find identifies the disc's content only vaguely as "words and sounds ... shouted into the mouth-piece," but the Volta group's notebooks reveal the general kind of test recitation they were then using, as for example:

July 4, 1881: "Several trilled R's--then--'Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow, and every where that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.'--Several trilled R's--then--'How is that for high'--trilled R's--and--One--two--three--four--five--six--seven--eight--nine--"

July 9, 1881: "There was a girl named O'Brian / Whose feet were like those of Orion, / To the circus she would go, / To see the great show, / And scratch the left ear of the lion. Trilled R's. - 'How is that for high' more trilled R's."

Apart from the recurring expression "How is that for high" -- roughly equivalent in 1881 to "How do you like them apples" -- the most striking common denominator here is the "trilled R's." From laboratory notes, I could tell that this sound had recorded unusually well, and that the Volta group had often inserted it at beginnings, ends, and section breaks. But I didn't know quite what it had sounded like. After all, nobody alive today had ever heard any of these experiments.