Spend a couple of minutes with an internet search engine and you can hear rolling out of your machine the voice of Alfred Lord Tennyson reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1890. Captured on a wax cylinder that seems to have got a bit squished by time, the wobbly and distorted voice comes down to us as an almost otherworldly chanting, vividly pounding out the dactyls of "half a league, half a league onwards", yet as remote as if it were from another planet.

The year before that, in 1889, Thomas Edison made it possible for us to know what Robert Browning sounded like, excitedly galloping through the rhythms of his verse and shouting out hurrahs. Later that year Browning succumbed to his last illness and so became the first person whose voice was ever heard after his death.