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Carl Haber was stuck in traffic one morning when he heard a radio report about the fragile state of historic sound recordings at the Library of Congress. Many popular songs and famous speeches from the early 1900s couldn't be played due to damage and decay. Archivists were looking for ways to restore and preserve them.Most of us would shake our heads and take another sip of coffee, but for Haber, a particle physicist, this was almost a eureka moment: He and Vitaliy Fadeyev, his colleague at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, specialized in making sensors to map the tracks made by subatomic particles unleashed in physics experiments. Could their methods be used to map the microscopic contours of those old sound recordings' grooves?
Haber thought so. By converting that analog information into a digital format, he theorized, a virtual copy of the old sound recordings could be created -- without playing the originals.
He was right. What he didn't know was that his drive-time brainstorm would end up pulling him and his partner into the heart of the most infamous of American murder mysteries: the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy.
In a National Archives vault in College Park, Maryland, lies a loop of floppy blue plastic known as Dallas Police Department Dictabelt No. 10. It contains sounds of chatter and noise recorded on one of two police radio channels between 12:05 and 12:40 p.m. on November 22, 1963. At 12:30 that day, President Kennedy and his wife were riding in an open limousine through downtown Dallas when gunshots rang out. One bullet struck the 46-year-old President in the head, killing him. Purely by accident, the radio microphone of a motorcycle cop riding with Kennedy's motorcade was stuck in the "on" position. That microphone transmitted the motorcade sounds back to police headquarters, where they were recorded onto plastic rolls known as Dictabelts.
Haber and Fadeyev didn't know about Dictabelt No. 10 when they began attempting new sound preservation techniques. And they have little interest in the specifics of JFK's assassination. "The real story here," says Haber, "is that there are technologies around that can be brought to bear on preservation."
But, having successfully developed a method for reproducing old recordings, he and his partner don't entirely dismiss the possibility that their approach could have a benefit for the millions of people still fascinated by the JFK case. Their protests aside, it's possible that this new technology could, in effect, transform the 41-year-old Dictabelt into a new piece of evidence -- and answer with scientific clarity a haunting question: Just how many shots were fired on that shocking day?
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