ABSTRACT
By this is meant the person with the earliest birthdate, not the person of most advanced age at the time of recording. The Phonogram reported that the manager of the Ohio Phonograph Co., Arthur Smith, had visited the home of Horatio Perry, a Cleveland centenarian, and made a record of his voice. Perry was born in 1790-so for a year he was a contemporary of Mozart. An even earlier birthdate is ascribed to one Peggy O’Leary, who sang an Irish melody into a phonograph in 1900; she was said to be 112 years old at the time, placing her birthdate in 1787 or 1788 (this was reported in HN #131, April 1983, by John S. Dales, who quoted a contemporary magazine account of the O’Leary rendition). Ms. O’Leary would almost surely be the earliest-born person to make a record. It seems that among professional singers, the earliest birthdate belongs to Peter Schram, a Danish baritone born in 1819. As reported in Recorded Sound 85 (January 1984) he made a private record in Copenhagen in 1889. Among well-known persons to record (noncommercially), the oldest was Cardinal John Henry Newman (born 1801), who is known to have made a cylinder in the late 1880s (reported by Peter Martland in HN #131, April 1983). The earliest born national leader to make a record was Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894) of Hungary. His address in Turin, Italy, on 20 Oct 1890, was recorded and a broken cylinder remains in the National Library in Budapest. Fragments of the speech are discernible. In 1977 a 45-rpm disc containing the fragment, plus the full speech read by an actor, was issued by Hungaroton. On commercial recordings, the recording artist with the earliest birthdate seems to be J.G. Tollemache Sinclair, who did recitations for G & T, Columbia (in London), and for Odeon. His declama-tion of “La jeune fille mourante” (G & T #1333) dates from November 1906. His birth took place in Edinburgh on 11 Aug 1825. Josef Joachim (born 1831) seems to have been the instrumentalist with earliest birthdate to record commercially, for G & T. Gustave Walter and Charles Santley (both born 1834) were apparently the earliest-born singers on commercial discs, recording for G & T in the 1900s. Santley’s rendition of “Non piu andrai” (G & T #05200; 1903) marked him as the earliest born singer to record an opera aria. Walter was the earliest born signer to record an aria in German: “Leb’ wohl, Mignon” (“Adieu, Mignon”) from Mignon (G & T #3-42154; 1905). [Johnson 1983.]
The oldest known record in existence today is one made in 1878 by Augustus Stroh (inventor of the Stroh violin). Still on the mandrel of his machine and never played, it was reported in Sound Box, November 1990, and ARSC Journal 22-1 (Spring 1991). Among extant records that have been played, the oldest may be an engraved metal cylinder made by Frank Lambert in 1878 or 1879. It was intended to be the sound track in a talking clock, and offers the hours: “One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock …” through twelve o’clock, with ten o’clock for some reason omitted. Another venerable
record is the white wax cylinder made by composer Arthur Sullivan, praising Thomas Edison for inventing the phonograph, but saying he shudders to think how much horrible music it will cause to be recorded. Jim Walsh (Hobbies April 1965) gives the date of that record as 5 Oct 1888. Another group of cylinders from 1888 was reported to be at the Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, New Jersey, in 1988 (NAG #65, July 1988). It consists of 22 records, 21 in white wax, made by Colonel Gouraud in London, during August 1888. They include a whistling number by “Mrs. Shaw,” a “letter from Col. Gouraud to Mr. Edison,” three live recordings of a Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace, and an “organ solo played on the grand organ at Westminster Abbey by Prof. Bridge.” There was no announced plan by officials at the Historic Site to play or reissue the cylinders, and it was not stated when (if ever) the records had been played in the past.
