Edison may not have been the first to record the human voice
On December 7, 1877, Thomas Edison walked into the offices of Scientific American and placed a metal device on a desk. With a turn of a crank, Edison astonished the dozen or so staffers who had gathered around the contraption.The machine spoke. “Good morning,” it said in Edison’s voice. “How do you do?” SciAm’s editors described the demonstration in the December 22, 1877, issue. “There can be no doubt,” they wrote, “but that the inflections are those of nothing else than the human voice.”Accompanying the report was adetailed sketch of Edison’s device, which the inventor called a phonograph. Virtually overnight, the article catapulted Edison to fame and established the phonograph as the first machine to record and reproduce human speech. But was it? On May 15, 2026, at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in Memphis, an audio historian proposed another candidate for the title — one that preceded Edison’s by nearly a century. (via Scientific American)
Pacific islanders saved his life in 1943 and he spent the rest of it repaying them
On June 5, 1943, Fred Hargesheimer was shot down by a Japanese fighter while on a mission over the Japanese-held island of New Britain in the southwest Pacific. He parachuted into the jungle, where he barely survived for 31 days until local hunters found him. They took him to their coastal village, and for seven months hid him from Japanese patrols, fed him and nursed him back to health. In February 1944 he was picked up by an American submarine. After returning to the United States following the war, Mr. Hargesheimer married and began a sales career. But he could never forget those who saved him. After revisiting the village of Ea Ea in 1960, he came home, raised $15,000 over three years and returned in 1963 with his son to contract for the building of the villagers’ first school. In the decades to come, Mr. Hargesheimer built a clinic, another school and libraries in Ea Ea, renamed Nantabu, and surrounding villages. (via the New York Times)
A Soviet scientist cracked the code of the Mayan language and said his cat helped him do it
From a young age, Yuri knew he wanted to dedicate his life to history. He entered Kharkiv State University to study at the Faculty of History, but World War II interrupted his education and forced him to move to Moscow. There, he continued his studies at the same faculty at Moscow State University. His interests went beyond history into ethnography, which led him to write his thesis on shamanic practices. Even then, he was fascinated by Maya writing — despite everyone around him insisting it could never be deciphered. At the time, decoding the Maya hieroglyphs was considered impossible. There were no keys or reference materials to guide the work. This meant Yuri had to do more than just decipher texts — he had to invent an entire system for working with these complex inscriptions from scratch. He had a cat named Asya, and he often said she inspired his greatest breakthrough: the method for deciphering the Maya script. (via Palme School)
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
His autistic child would only drink from one specific cup so the company custom made it
in 2004 or so, Ben Carter, then age 2, started using the cup pictured above. Fast forward to 2016, and he was still using the cup. Ben, then age 14, was on the severe end of the autism spectrum. His father posted to Twitter that Ben would only drink from this specific blue cup — he doesn’t drink from anything else, to the point of requiring two emergency trips to the hospital due to severe dehydration. Unfortunately, Tommee Tippee retired this specific line of cups. Giving Ben a newer version didn’t work. So he took to social media. Hundreds if not thousands helped spread Marc’s message. And ultimately, the Tommee Tippee company noticed. The company searched for the mold for the original cup, located it — and got to work. Per a company spokesperson, Tommee Tippee was “able to start production on a run of the original cup,” producing 500 or so, enough to “ensure that Ben has a lifetime supply.” (via Now I Know)
Charles Darwin’s grandfather proposed his own theory of evolution seventy years earlier
Erasmus Robert Darwin was an English physician. He was also a natural philosopher, inventor, and poet. His poems included much natural history, including a statement of evolution and the relatedness of all forms of life. He was a founding member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a discussion group of pioneering industrialists and natural philosophers. Darwin’s final long poem, The Temple of Nature, was published posthumously in 1803. The poem was originally titled The Origin of Society. It is considered his best poetic work. It centres on his own conception of evolution. The poem traces the progression of life from micro-organisms to civilised society. The poem contains a passage that describes the struggle for existence. Percy Bysshe Shelley specifically mentions Darwin in the first sentence of the 1818 Preface to Frankenstein to support his contention that the creation of life is possible. (via Wikipedia)
This kid’s bird descriptions and imitations are mind-boggling
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com
