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 . `` I think this is a very critical episode in the history of American invention and innovation and it highlights an otherwise unknown aspect of Washington , D.C. , at the end of the 19th century as the center of invention and innovation , '' said Carlene Stephens , curator of the Smithsonian 's National Museum of American History . Bell sent recordings to the Smithsonian in the 1880s for safekeeping , and to prove his scientific finds in case of patent questions . But there was no playback device , so `` the collection has been silent , '' said Stephens . Enter modern-day scientists Haber and Earl Cornell , who took detailed photos of the discs made in Bell 's laboratory and created a virtual playback machine on a computer . `` To be or not to be , that is the question , '' begins one of the recordings from a green wax disc that scientists believe was recorded in 1885 . The male voice reading the famous quote from Shakespeare 's Hamlet is muddled , but understandable . On a glass disc recording from 1884 , a voice can be heard saying the word `` barometer '' several times . And on another type of wax recording from 1885 , a man is heard reading a description of a cotton factory in New Hampshire . To get the audio from the discs , the Berkeley scientists put them on a turntable . As the disc slowly turned , as many as 18,000 images per rotation were recorded in the computer . The images were then stacked up to create a digital profile , which , when read by the computer , played back the sound . `` These technologies are very fast and these computers are fast , '' said Haber . `` Ten years ago , we would be struggling with computer storage and computer speed . Today , commercial technology is up to this task . '' There is no physical contact with the historically valuable discs , which helps to protect them for the long term . The scientists in the 1880s experimented with a variety of experimental mechanisms , many of which the Smithsonian has in their collection . Each disc or cylinder plays differently . `` It turns out this record was designed to play from the inside-out , so that 's backwards from how we normally play a record , '' said Haber , showing reporters the disc . After the Berkeley Lab scientists had photographed that record , they reversed the information in the computer to play it . Although the scientists at Bell 's Volta Laboratory would have been working on a playback device as they were making the recordings , none of those made it into the Smithsonian 's archives . Three times during the 1880s , Bell sent sealed tin boxes to the Smithsonian Institution with objects and newspapers to prove that his laboratory had made certain discoveries by certain dates in case a patent dispute arose . None ever did . The sealed boxes were opened for the first time in 1937 in the presence of Bell 's family . Bell also donated materials to the Smithsonian during the early 1900s , when he served on the governing board of the museum . Those items , along with materials from Emile Berliner , a competitor of Bell , are stored at the National Museum of American History . Berliner is credited with inventing the gramophone , the first commercially successful disc and playback machine . The museum has about 400 early audio recordings made between 1878 and 1898 .
Bell was working on improving the phonograph . His 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 .