Washington (CNN) -- Voices recorded by inventor Alexander Graham Bell more than 125 years ago are being heard now, thanks to digital imaging technology. "It's not high fidelity, but you can definitely figure out what they're saying," said Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the scientists working on the project in a laboratory at the Library of Congress. The early audio recordings were made during an intensely competitive time, when scientists were racing to improve on Thomas Edison's phonograph, which was invented in 1877. Scientists like Bell, who worked at his Volta Laboratory in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, were looking to improve both the quality of the phonograph and the nature of the sound to make the product commercially viable.Bell was working on improving the phonographHis early recordings are at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History"To be or not to be, that is the question" a voice on one recording is heard saying
Although the scientists at Bell's _ would have been working on a playback device as they were making the recordings, none of those made it into the Smithsonian's archives.