(Daily Mail)…For decades it lay in the bottom of a secretary’s desk drawer, its purpose unknown. But now, 123 years after it was made, the secret of this bent metal ring, which was found in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, has finally been uncovered. Scientists have found that the microscopic grooves on the ring make up the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ and mark the world’s first attempt at a talking doll and the dawn of America’s recording industry.
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Using advanced imaging technology they have recovered a 12 second sound recording of a woman reciting a verse of the children’s song. They believe the tin ring was intended to be the key component of one of Thomas Edison’s talking dolls. Historians think Edison hired the woman to make the recording less than two years before he unsuccessfully put the first talking doll on the market. ‘Based on the date of fall 1888, it is the oldest American-made recording of a woman’s voice that we can listen to today,’ said Patrick Feaster, a historian at Indiana University in Bloomington. Mr Feaster pored over historical documents and 19th-century newspaper reports to piece together the story behind the recording.

Edison hoped to mass-produce the toys, but the era’s rudimentary technology meant that to make 100 dolls, Edison would have to get artists to recite the lullaby 100 times. ‘They must have been hired and paid to do this,’ Mr Feaster said. ‘These were presumably the first professional recording artists.’ The small piece of ring-shaped tin bearing the woman’s voice never made it into a doll because wax records replaced metal ones by 1890, when Edison started selling his first talking dolls. Those fragile and easily broken toys were a market flop. Yet almost 80 years after the mystery woman lent her voice to Edison, the recording showed up in 1967 in the archives of the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, having been recovered from a secretary’s desk drawer in Edison’s laboratory.

‘It was clear from looking under the microscope that it had a sound recording on it. Phonograph grooves have a familiar shape,’ said Jerry Fabris, a museum curator with the National Park Service. But the metal ring – about 2.5 inches around and half an inch wide – was so bent and damaged that scientists couldn’t play it. More than four decades later, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, used image analysis to create a digital model of the record’s surface. That model was then used to reproduce the recording as a digital file, not unlike the modern technology behind the voice that emerges from today’s talking dolls.