A Voice from the Past

  My son Carl Haber is a physicist with a major research project underway in Cern Switzerland. He designs and has constructed the detectors  that detect a fallout from the smashing of atoms. One day while driving home from his laboratory in Berkeley, California , he was listening to the radio. The person speaking said here were many old recordings broken, scratched or otherwise in so bad a condition they could no longer be played on a conventional phonograph.

     Carl started to give thought to determine if there was some way in which to detect the sound from a recording, without the use of a conventional needle touching the surface of the recording. He pursued it to the point where he developed a way that could in fact extract the sound from a record without having a needle touching its surface. This became  extremely important to record archivists with the result that Carl’s equipment is now in operation in Berkeley, California, the Library of Congress, Andover, Massachusetts  and India. He has lectured the subject throughout the United States and abroad. As an indication of t he importance of this development, Cal was awarded d the MacArthur Fellowship Award.

     I enjoy telling a true story that flows from the above. A man was a bomber pilot in World War !! who flew many missions over Germany and survived. At the war’s end, he settled in Massachusetts, married and raised his family. He wrote several stories about his war time experiences for local newspapers and one of the radio stations invited him to discuss those experiences and he did so.

     After he passed away, one of his son’s wife gave birth to a son. The son of course never met his grandfather or heard him speak. He was able to read the newspaper articles, but the radio station interviews seemed to have disappeared. After his grandmother passed away, the young man was helping to remove the contents in her garage. In doing so, he picked up a large envelope and when opened, it contained two 78  records , each broken in half. They were his grandfather’s radio recordings.  Suffice it to say, they could not be played. At some point he came across Carl’s invention and found out there was a facility in Andover in operation.

He arranged to go there with the broken recordings and when inserted in the equipment, a voice  was heard. It was that of his grandfather. It was like a voice from the grave. It moves me when I think of this poignant story andI hope it appeals to all ll who hear it.

Ben Haber