Saturday, November 03, 2007
Only known recording of Andrew Carnegie gives voice to history
Post Gazette: "Andrew Carnegie is 78 years old, far from Pittsburgh and the steelmaking that made him rich. His voice is shrill, laced with an unmistakable Scottish brogue, as he reads from his 1889 essay 'The Gospel of Wealth,' a text he altered slightly for a reading inside Thomas Edison's sound studio in the Bronx, N.Y."
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7 comments:
This is exciting for us as Carnegie Mellon students and as theatre technicians. Carnegie Mellon, one of the greatest living people. i also love how the article has an link to the sound clip. I have never read 'The Gospel of Wealth' but from that article and that description of Carnegie's essay it makes me proud to be at his school. we do a lot at the school to honor him and its nice to be able to feel closer to him even if it is by listening to a recording of his voice from before we were born.
Ok, I have a problem with this article, just like I have with most historical evidence of Carnegie's "effect" on Pittsburgh. If any of you have ever read "I'll Meet You in Hell", you would know that Carnegie was a ruthless and very inconsiderate man. He hated unions, stole from his partners and didn't start becoming the "father of modern philanthropy" until he realized he didn't know what to do with all of his money.
At this point in his life, Carnegie probably had already done everything that he really wanted to do in life. At this point, the most important thing was helping his reputation, and keeping it strong. Thus, from just this recording, we definitely do not get any insight into the "negative" side of Carnegie's life, which I have heard about from several sources. Any person who has this type of reputation, though, will try to turn it around the way Carnegie does.
I think the more interesting part of this article is about the changes that he made to his text for recording purposes. I think its interesting what people assume will read better versus what will sound better, or make a larger impact on the public when its read aloud. Also, its interesting that we now have an idea of what his voice souds like. That can tell you so much about someone, about their personality and about them personally, that it's amazing that we can uncover this kind of information today about someone famous.
I agree with anthony, that there is a lot of controversy surrounding the "honoring" of Carnegie, but we can't deny that he did some good in the world, whether he really meant it or not.
Carnegie's philanthropic nature is always going to be a controversy. I personally am conflicted because he was a very influential man and he did live in time where the morality surrounding union-busting was questionable. The Kinetophone device is actually something my brother wrote a paper about not too long ago. He said it was one of those lost sound mediums that no one bothers to think about.
This is very interesting and adds a new dimension to this man. Pictures of him make him out to be an almost burly man, but his voice is a powerful, prideful, Scotsman with a high voice. The quality is not as bad as I would have expected for the recording medium. Some of the things that he says are very profound, especially about wealth.
So what I find interesting about this article is that it is about a recording made in the midst of a very exciting era when recordings were cutting edge, and the possibilities were undiscovered. The fact that Carnegie is recorded on a device made up by Edison, but not the final device created and perfected by edison is pretty cool. He not only is a part of history because of the obvious, but he is also recorded in the creation of audio and video devices.
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