A (tiny) recording of Amelia Earhart’s 1932 London speech, played for the first time (opens in new tab)

A reference librarian stumbled across a tiny recording of a speech by Amelia Earhart tucked inside a copy of her 1932 memoir, published soon after she became the first woman (and the second person) to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. The record was just a promotional gimmick at the time; could it still be played, 94 years later? Yes, thanks to the Library's IRENE project, which uses optical imaging to scanned damaged or broken records to reconstruct their sounds on a digital file.