The recording’s grooves, seen through the microscope.

What’s the News: More than a century ago, Thomas Edison recorded a woman speaking the first verse of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a metal cylinder for use in a talking doll. Now, scientists using microscopes to create 3D scans of the badly damaged cylinder have made it possible to hear her voice again, through the patina of years.

How the Heck:

The recording is encoded in a series of grooves carved by a stylus into a short cylinder or ring of metal, which was found in Thomas Edison’s West Orange, NJ, laboratory, now a museum. But the cylinder had grown so warped that it could not be played on any phonograph or similar device.
Using a confocal microscope, usually used by biologists for making detailed 3D images of cells and cellular structures, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scanned the cylinder to recording the meanderings of the grooves, whose slight variations in depth correspond to modulations in the voice of the speaker.
When they hooked their topographical map of the cylinder up to audio software, they heard, through the skips and scratches, the words of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”