World's Earliest Recorded Voice Prompts Fit of Giggles

When Radio 4 Presenter Charlotte Green, usually a bastion of composure as a voice of authority at the Beeb, was presenting about the world's earliest recording of the human voice, a facetious comment from one of the other Today presenters provoked a very uncharacteristic fit of giggles. The recording that provoked the BBC meltdown, made on a device called a phonoautograph, was made 17 years before Thomas Edison's 1877 phonograph introduced the world to recorded sound. At the time the world's first audio clip could be recorded but not played back. Only recently, with digital technology, has it been recovered.

Neither James Naughtie or Ed Stourton would admit to whispering it sounded like a bee buzzing in a bottle but it was enough to crack Ms Green's famous layers of reserve. Immediately the BBC switchboard was inundated with callers and then went into meltdown... with people asking, not to hear the world's earliest recording again, but to hear something far more unusual: Green losing her reserve.

You can listen to the broadcast clip here.