Alexander Graham Bell, the man widely credited with inventing the telephone as we know it (though there is a longstanding debate over who actually was first), can be heard again today, some 128 years after he recorded himself counting and speaking in his laboratory in Washington, DC, saying: "In witness whereof, hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell." The historic lost audio file — the first recording of Bell's voice — was retrieved by several researchers around the country using a technique developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 
 
 Bell's audio recording was made on an old experimental wax disk that he later donated to the Smithsonian Institution's collection, but it was deemed "unplayable" due to its antiquated technology. Researchers weren't sure what device was used to play it back or if it was pristine enough to even reproduce the original sounds. 
 
 "In witness whereof, hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell." 
 
 But starting in 2011, researchers at the Library of Congress began using audio recovery technology created by two Berkeley researchers that had been successful at recovering other pieces of audio history, including a tinfoil record made by Thomas Edison and an 1860 recording dubbed the "earliest" in history. The Berkeley method, which was based on particle physics equipment, relies on taking high-resolution digital images of the surface of a physical audio recording medium, such as Bell's wax disc, then running an analysis to rebuild the areas of the recording that are damaged. The result this time: the first playable record of Bell's voice ever obtained in history. Hear it below for yourself in the YouTube video above and view a transcript Bell wrote here. ||||| America 
 
 Edison's Talking Dolls Can Now Provide The Soundtrack To Your Nightmares 
 
 i itoggle caption Collection of Robin and Joan Rolfs/Courtesy of Thomas Edison National Historical Park Collection of Robin and Joan Rolfs/Courtesy of Thomas Edison National Historical Park 
 
 Back in 1890, Thomas Edison gave us some of the world's first talking dolls. Today, the glassy-eyed cherubs that are still around stand about 2 feet tall; they have wooden limbs and a metal body; and they sound supercreepy. (If you're looking for a soundtrack to your nightmares, listen to the audio story above.) Edison built and sold about 500 of them back in 1890. Now, new technology has made hearing them possible for the first time in decades. 
 
 Jerry Fabris, who curates sound recordings at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, says part of what makes the recordings so unsettling is that they were most likely read by a female factory worker imitating a little girl. (For example: Here's a shrieking recitation of "A Child's Prayer" that you will never unhear.) 
 
 Fabris says Edison was, for the first time, trying to market the then-brand-new wax cylinder phonograph for people to use at home, and he thought the best vehicle would be a doll. Its metal body held a miniature phonograph that was spring-activated by a crank sticking out of the doll's back. Edison knew the sound quality was raw, so he had the dolls recite recognizable verses like "Hickory Dickory Dock." 
 
 i itoggle caption John Reed/National Park Service John Reed/National Park Service 
 
 The recordings didn't sound much better in 1890 than they do today. Fabris says, "Edison himself thought they were unpleasant." And so did everyone else. The dolls flopped in the market, not because people thought they were creepy but because they were expensive — about $200 in today's money. People also thought the dolls weren't lifelike enough; they wanted moving mouths and for the dolls' voices to be understandable. Edison stopped making the dolls after about a month. 
 
 "After the business failed, he referred to them as 'little monsters,' " Fabris says. 
 
 And that raises a larger question: Why do we find talking dolls so scary? Talking toys occupy a horror subgenre so established that it's led to parodies. According to Georgetown University horror scholar Caetlin Benson-Allott, a talking toy belongs in an unsettling middle space: It's human, but not that human. 
 
 "It's both familiar and different," she says, "and we don't kind of understand if it's entirely dead or entirely alive." 
 
 It's what Sigmund Freud called "the uncanny," and we can feel it as a subconscious holdover from childhood, when we pretended our dolls were real. Even as knowing grown-ups, Benson-Allott says, there's a lurking apprehension "that that doll is actually alive and watching me." 
 
 She says we've probably freaked ourselves out with dolls for as long as we've used dolls — in ritual and in play. From a talking doll to technology, she says, when we give anything power there's a sense — even a fear — that that power might turn back on us.
– The Smithsonian has released a nifty video that allows us to hear the voice of Alexander Graham Bell for the first time, reports the Verge. "Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell," the inventor says in the recording, made in 1885 at his lab in DC. The wax disc had been in storage for more than a century, but it wasn't until researchers developed new audio-recovery technology that Bell's voice could be heard. In the recording, he spends most of the time reciting numbers. See his own transcript via the Smithsonian here.