The earliest-born person whose voice survives was a Prussian field marshal
Helmuth von Moltke was born in 1800, and in October 1889 he spoke into a phonograph; two of those recordings still exist. The general who built the modern general staff was also a translator, travel writer and railway investor, and it was said he never made a big decision without checking the train timetables.
Moltke was born in Parchim, Mecklenburg, the son of a German officer in Danish service whose family was left poor when French troops burned their country house in 1806. Trained at the Royal Danish Military Academy, he served as a page to King Frederick VI, then at 21 switched to the Prussian army despite losing seniority. He took up literature as well as soldiering, publishing a short romance and studies of Poland and the Low Countries. To buy a horse he agreed to translate Gibbon's Decline and Fall into German, finished nine of twelve volumes in eighteen months, and was paid only 25 of the promised 75 marks when the publisher failed.
In 1835 Sultan Mahmud II asked him to help modernise the Ottoman army. Moltke learned Turkish, surveyed Constantinople and the straits, rode thousands of miles across Anatolia and shot the rapids of the Euphrates. When the Ottoman commander ignored his advice before the Battle of Nezib in 1839, Moltke took charge of the artillery; the Ottomans lost, but his conduct won him Prussia's Pour le Mérite.
Back home he became an early director of the Hamburg–Berlin railway and put his savings into Prussian lines, growing wealthy. Well before Germany had a railway of its own, he urged the staff to back rail building for moving and supplying troops, arguing that finishing railways was a better use of money than new fortresses. Appointed chief of the Prussian General Staff in 1857, a post he held for 30 years, he reorganised training, communications and mobilisation, introduced staff rides, and added a railway section.
A follower of Clausewitz rather than of Jomini's rule-books, Moltke treated strategy as a practical art of matching means to ends. He grasped early how much modern firearms strengthened defenders and concluded that enveloping an enemy had become more effective than punching through his front. In the war with Denmark in 1864 he was brought in as chief of staff and planned the crossing to the island of Als, which helped end the fighting. He went on to direct campaigns against Austria and France, and died in 1891.
Source: Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
