Recordings from 1880s get airing

WASHINGTON - Early sound recordings by Alexander Graham Bell that were packed away at the Smithsonian Institution for more than a century were played publicly for the first time on Tuesday using new technology that reads the sound with light and a 3D camera.

"To be, or not to be ..." a man's voice can be heard saying in one recording, the speaker reciting a portion of Hamlet's Soliloquy as a green wax disc crackles to life from computer speakers. Another recording on a copper negative disc that was played back at the US Library of Congress reveals a trill of the tongue and someone reciting the numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6.

The recordings date back to the 1880s. Bell had moved from Boston to Washington after inventing the telephone and joined a growing group of scientists who made the nation's capital a hotbed for innovations.