Since being unemployed (my boss at the pub having stopped giving me any hours three weeks ago) and separated from one's friends by their universities leaves one very little to talk about, I'm going to start writing posts inspired by things that happened 'on this date in history'. Today is the ninth of April, and here are some things that happened on that date:
1860 - The oldest audible recording of a human voice is made. 150 years ago, a man sang 'Au Clair de la Lune' into a machine called a phonoautograph, which transcribed the sounds onto a sheet of glass covered in lamp-black.
To be fair, I'm not sure it counts as such, since at the time, people used these things to look at a sound - rather like the oscilloscopes we had in science lessons - rather than to be able to listen back to it later on. There was no way to turn the phonoautogram made by the machine back into sound. of course, computers have now made it possible to transfer the 'recordings' back into something you can hear. It sounds like the singer was in a high wind at the time but it's definitely a human voice, from more than a century ago.
in 1867, the USA bought Alaska from the Russians. This caused Sarah Palin.
then in both world wars there were battles going on, including the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1945, there were the funerals of Martin Luther King (1968) and the Queen mother (2002) and Georgia claimed independence from the Soviet union in 1991
Today, we have electioneering, some protesters in Thailand invading a TV station and for me, preparations for the third annual spring picnic which is on Sunday
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