(CNN USA Nike Shox) -- 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,Nike Shox Mens Shoes 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.

Nike Shox Womens Shoes 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."