A recovered recording of Amelia Earhart’s 1932 London speech after flying solo nonstop across the Atlantic has been restored.
Earhart was the first woman, and second person, to complete the 15-hour flight, five years to the day that Charles Lindbergh achieved it.
Amanda Zimmerman, a reference specialist at the Library of Congress of America, recovered the 94-year-old tiny record from a first-edition copy of Earhart’s memoir The Fun of It. Her husband and publisher George Putman distributed the tiny 78rpm record of the speech snippet with editions of the book.
In the 20-second recoding, Earhart tells the scary and dangerous story of her solo Atlantic flight. During her flight, the altimeter (which registers height above ground) failed, something that had never happened before in her 12 years of flying.
“The hand swung around the dial in such a manner that I know it was out of commission for the rest of the night," she says.
On one side of the recovered record was a type of cheap plastic, and the other side was made of cardboard. The envelope it was enclosed in was made of a highly acidic pulp paper. While an old phonograph might have been able to play it, it was likely that the needle would break the grooves of it. Through close inspection of the file, it was also revealed that the record had never been played.
To restore this tiny record, the Library of Congress lab technicians used optical imaging to create a digital file of the record. This method never touches the record’s surface; instead using a focal probe that can be directed at a specific point to capture in 3D each tiny change in the grooves of the record. This scan took nearly three hours before moving on to the process of cleaning the file up.
This method, called the IRENE project, can digitise records that are corroded, marked with junk, or even broken into pieces.
Five years after she made this speech, Amelia would disappear whilst attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world. In the final 7000 miles she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, lost all contact flying over the Pacific Ocean from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island. Her disappearance remains a mystery to this day.
The speech is available to listen to here.