Restoring the Queen Victoria recording of 1888

In the early 1880s, researchers at a laboratory established by Alexander Graham Bell perfected a process of making recordings on wax coated cardboard cylinders, which allowed the human voice, as well as musical instruments and such like, to be recorded and replayed many times and with better reproduction. The improvements were partly due to the wax medium being more effective for the storage and transmission of sound waves, but also because the recordings were cut into the wax rather than being embossed (as was the case with the tin foil recordings). Bell's invention was patented as the Graphophone . As a result of this development, tin foil was quickly abandoned as a recording medium and within a few years all phonograph cylinders were made of wax (subsequently other materials were also used).

Sydney Morse - an investor in the British arm of the Graphophone company - had royal connections and in the Autumn of 1888 gained permission to take a Graphophone machine and several blank cylinders to Balmoral Castle in Scotland to demonstrate the recording technique to Queen Victoria. This could have been a considerable publicity coup, but Morse was strongly warned against advertising the event. Details of the occasion were, however, given by Henry Edmunds, the European representative for the Graphophone company, in "Reminiscences Of A Pioneer", an article he wrote 30 years later (published in the London newspaper "The Standard" in 1919): "My Offices in Hatton Garden were thronged with persons of all grades of society, all astonished with the new Gramophone (sic). Its fame even reached the ears of Royalty and the aged Queen Victoria expressed a desire to have a demonstration at Balmoral Castle. I could not go myself but my friend and solicitor,  Mr Sydney Morse, took an instrument to Scotland and had the honour of showing it to the delightful old lady. Abandoning the usual Royal reserve, Her Majesty expressed her unqualified delight; so much so that Mr Morse was emboldened to request the Queen to speak a few words into the Gramophone (sic)".

Further on in his "Reminiscences", Henry Edmunds states "Mr Morse exhibited to me a small black cylinder with a few spiral lines traced upon it, containing the record of the voice and speech of the celebrated Queen. He declared that it was his most cherished possession: and would pass it to his children as his chiefest treasure."

In 1929, the estate of Sydney Morse (who had died that year) donated several items of interest to the Science Museum, London, including a Graphophone cylinder. Sydney's son Esmond Morse stated in a letter to the museum that his father had demonstrated the Graphophone to Queen Victoria and had recorded her voice. Decades later, two of Sydney Morse's grandchildren recalled that a cylinder was occasionally played to them in the 1920s and were told at the time that the female voice they heard was that of Queen Victoria.

For many years, the Science Museum remained unaware that the Graphophone cylinder that had been donated in 1929 by the Morse family was of such enormous potential historical significance. It was the author and researcher Paul Tritton who pulled all the various aspects together and realised the importance of the Graphophone cylinder held by the Science Museum. Mr Tritton arranged for sound engineers from the National Sound Archive (now the British Library Sound Archive) to make a digital transfer of the cylinder in 1991.

Given the above, it is quite possible that what you hear coming from this Graphophone cylinder recorded back in 1888 is indeed Queen Victoria's faint voice, but the cylinder has been badly damaged in the intervening years through repeated playing using a heavy stylus that has damaged the wax, making the recorded voice it contains difficult to decipher. Moreover, the person speaking has a soft voice, which mitigates against a clear recording being able to be made in the first place.

I have attempted to make the voice in this recording clearer, using a combination of audio restoration/forensic techniques. I cannot claim to have solved the riddle of this most precious of recordings, but for what it's worth I would like to suggest - after hours of listening and re-listening to the recording - that what is said might be:-

"Britons restless for their Queen to speak, let me answer, if can be, towards the end to a wonderful gift to me I have never forgotten"