For the first time, 21st-century audiences are able to hear the voice of Otto von Bismarck, one of the 19th century’s most important figures.

The National Park Service announced last week that the German chancellor’s voice has been identified among those found on a dozen recorded wax cylinders, each more than 120 years old, that were once stored near Thomas Edison’s cot in his West Orange, N.J., lab.

The cylinders include music and dignitaries, including the voice of the only person born in the 18th century believed to be available on a recording.

The trove includes Bismarck’s voice reciting songs and imploring his son to live morally and eat and drink in moderation.

The people who study and collect early recordings knew they had been made but did not know they still existed.

“Most early recordings I have read about had not survived,” said Patrick Feaster, an Indiana University scholar who also helped crack the mystery of what was on the cylinders.

The recordings were made in 1889 and 1890 by Theo Wangemann, whom Edison sent to supervise the use of the Edison Phonograph Works machines on display at the Paris World’s Fair in 1889 before traveling to his native Germany.

Feaster describes Wangemann as “the first serious professional recording engineer.”

While in Paris, he recorded orchestras, pianists, a comedian and others. He even recorded on the then-new Eiffel Tower.

The story of the fragile brown wax cylinders picks up again in 1957, Fabris said. That was when the Edison home and laboratory were donated to the National Park Service.

At the time, there was a quick inventory of the lab’s contents. A card attached to the wooden box said where it had been found. By then, Fabris said, some of the cylinders were broken by someone trying to pry open the locked box, which had one enticing feature in the form of the two words scratched in the wood: “Edison,” and “Wangemann.”

Jerry Fabris, curator of the museum at the Thomas Edison National Historic Park since 1994, said he started a decade-long task of cataloging all 39,000 phonographs in the collection in 1995, moving from the easiest to identify to the oldest, most experimental – and often unlabeled – ones.

He said he first gave a close look to the Wangemann cylinders in 2005. But at the time, he didn’t have the equipment needed to convert the sounds stored on those fragile pieces into digital files. By 2010, he had what was needed and was able to convert the dozen cylinders that weren’t too badly broken.

“When I heard that it was German speaking,” he said, “that was a big clue that these might be something very important.”