Libraries: Sound Scholarship

“We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!” cried Teddy Roosevelt at the G.O.P. Convention in 1912.

Everyone has read those words in history books; few know that T.R. spoke them in drumbeat tempo and a high-pitched voice that seem mismatched to the thunderous sentiment. But thanks to Edison, who first recorded the human voice in 1877, T.R.’s words were later etched in wax. Thanks to Michigan State University’s new National Voice Library, Americans can now hear his speech, along with 16,000 other voices and sounds going back to the 1880s—everything from Gladstone hailing “the triumph of the phonograph” to Billy

Sunday denouncing drink (“We don’t need jags, we need Jesus!”).

Wellington’s Bugle. The man behind the world’s biggest such babel is Curator G. Robert Vincent, 63, whose faith in sound-as-scholarship rests on the idea that “the voice is the surest index to character.” Vincent got his idea back in 1913, when at the age of twelve he thrust a cumbersome Edison machine under Teddy Roosevelt’s mustache and begged him to speak. In his oddly manful squeak, T.R. advised all boykind: “Don’t flinch, don’t foul and hit the line hard!” With that coup, Vincent began recording every sound in sight. After Yale (’22), he spent ten years working for Edison himself, eventually inherited a voxologist’s gold mine—Edison’s own early wax cylinders.

A new static-filter that he invented let Vincent re-record with good clarity everything from William Jennings Bryan’s cross-of-gold speech to Big Ben tolling in the 20th century to Robert E. Peary tersely describing his 1909 conquest of the North Pole. Eeriest of all: Trumpeter Kenneth Landfrey’s hair-raising bugle call for the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854. Landfrey restaged it for Edison in 1890, using the same bugle that also screeched Wellington’s troops on to victory at Waterloo in 1815.

Mail-Order History. Between World Wars, Collector Vincent recorded everyone from Lenin to Stalin to Wilson to F.D.R. He developed the famous wartime V-disc for G.I.s to “write” home, set up the multilingual sound systems at the Nuremburg trials and the U.N. Out of all this came a memorable 1950 record, Hark! The Years, narrated by Fredric March, which has been a collector’s item selling for as much as $75. Happily, the Michigan State audiovisual center has just reissued it for $5.

When Vincent set up Michigan State’s voice library in 1962, he arrived with 8,000 voices. As a result of diligent collecting since then, he will soon have more than 16,000. He can now recreate anything from battle sounds of the Spanish-American War to the words of 13 Presidents, starting with Grover Cleveland. Scholars and students must still visit the library to hear Champ Clark or Queen Victoria, for example, but Vincent hopes eventually to serve the country with mail-order tapes at a small charge. With that teaching tool, he should easily prove what he obviously believes: that one sound is worth 1,000 printed words.