Talking Machines: Soot, Tinfoil, Tape, and 170 Years of Recorded Sound

For almost all of human history, every sound disappeared forever.Nobody alive has ever heard Abraham Lincoln's voice. Nobody heard Beethoven play his own music. Every song, every laugh, every word ever spoken vanished the second it ended - until a printer in Paris built a machine to draw a picture of a voice in soot.He never figured out how to play it back. It took 148 years, and a computer he could never have imagined, for the world to finally hear what he recorded.Talking Machines is the wild, surprising story of how people learned to catch sound and keep it. Along the way, readers meet: - The inventor who shouted a nursery rhyme into a sheet of tinfoil - and was stunned when it answered back- Records made from resin harvested from insects in South Asia- The singer in Calcutta who had to squeeze an hour-long performance into three minutes- The soldier who mailed a captured German tape recorder home in pieces and changed music forever- The German engineers who shrank songs by deleting the parts your ears can't hearIt's also the story of a single wiggly line - scratched in soot, pressed into wax, carved into vinyl, frozen into magnetism, and finally turned into numbers - that ended up in your pocket.Packed with 20 hands-on experiments using things already in your kitchen: see a sound wave with a bowl and some salt, build a phonograph needle out of a snack box, and find out why the end of a record always sounds worse than the beginning.With 19 original diagrams, a timeline, a glossary, and a who's-who of the inventors, rivals, and collectors who made it happen.Perfect for curious readers ages 9-12, classroom libraries, homeschool science and history units, and anyone who has ever wondered how a song gets inside a phone.