'The earliest photograph to show a human…' (Click to enlarge.)

By MIKE DASH [Smithsonian] – There is no real doubt that Britain’s longest-reigning monarch allowed her voice to be recorded in that long-ago fall. The man who made the recording freely discussed it and it is recalled in a letter in the Royal Archives, dated 1907; the incident also rates a passing mention (without a source attribution) in Elizabeth Longford’s exhaustive biography of the Queen, Victoria R.I. The question is what happened to the recording after it was made—and, in a broader sense, why it matters whether it still exists. The search for the recording takes us from the New Jersey laboratories of Thomas Edison to the Highlands of Scotland, and from the archives of the Rolls-Royce motor company to the vaults beneath London’s Science Museum. Before we set of on that trail, though, we first need to understand why anyone should be interested in a few utterly unimportant phrases spoken by a long-dead queen.

The answer to that question tells us much about the nature of historical evidence, for the point, surely, is that the immediacy of the medium is key. This can be true of other sources, too—a letter written by an Assyrian teenager in about 700 B.C., complaining from his boarding school that his friends all have more fashionable clothes than he does, similarly telescopes the centuries, making us feel that we can almost understand what was an immeasurably alien time and place. But if mere words possess the unsettling ability to bring the past sharply into focus, the same is doubly or triply true for photographs and sound recordings.

There is, for instance, something unutterably eerie about the earliest photograph to show a human being. Shot from a window high above the Boulevard du Temple in Paris in 1838, using the brand new daguerrotype process, the plate captures a solitary gentleman who has stopped to have his shoes shined…

Continued at the Smithsonian | The Queen’s speech | More Chronicle & Notices.

[Via Victoria list post.]