The Lost Voice of Queen Victoria : The Search for the First Royal Recording

Dust jacket complete, sellotaped to paste downs. Illustrations / Photographs. 144 pages clean and tight. The Lost Voice of Queen Victoria "A gramophone was brought to Balmoral by Mr Morse and after the household had recorded whistles and German jokes. Her Majesty spoke a few words." The Countess of Longford, Victoria R.I. Queen Victoria was the first reigning monarch to make a sound recording. She did this in 1888 for Sydney Morse, an emminent London solicitor, who took a Graphophone recording machine to Balmoral, where he made a number of recordings. Until now historians have simply assumed that no recording of the Queen's voice had survived into this century and that Morse's recording had been irretrievably lost. They reckoned without the persistence of award-winning author Paul Tritton, who. after painstaking research, embarked on a trail that led to the Science Museum, where a Graphophone cylinder had been stored since 1929, its historic significance unrecognized. The Lost Voice of Queen Victoria presents Tritton's evidence about the introduction of recorded sound into Britain, the fate of Morse's recordings, the problems that had to be overcome to get the suspected "Queen Victoria" cylinder played and the astonishing results heard when the recording was enhanced by the latest audio technology. Size: 8vo.…