Are there any recordings of Mary Baker Eddy?

(Updated November 19, 2025)

The Library’s researchers are sometimes asked this question. While the technology existed during her lifetime, no film or audio recordings of Mary Baker Eddy were ever made. Here is some further background.

Sarah Pike Conger was a Christian Scientist who worked for peace in China during the Boxer Rebellion and kept a correspondence with Eddy. On August 1, 1910, Conger wrote to Eddy’s secretary Irving C. Tomlinson, asking if she would consider making a recording of her voice. Tomlinson included Conger’s explanation for that request in his reminiscence:

“I [Conger] had made a willing loving study of her [Eddy’s] writings and loved them, but when I heard her voice utter the words there was a life in them beyond the written word — and they have vibrated in sweet-echoing tones through these years, helping me to ‘remember’ and to detect the Christ-hand ever pointing the way heavenward. My heart’s inmost loving gratitude for that hour’s hearing can not be told and my treasured thought is this — that more might hear that voice, in its earnestness, its intonation, its tenderness, its thrill of superior understanding. This desire has come to me through the living word uttered to me by dear Mrs. Eddy herself. There are instruments perfected to a great extent which are very true to the human voice. Would it not be wise if our dear Leader could speak into these instruments in her sweet, tender, positive tones passages from the Bible and selections from some of her wonderful writings?”

Tomlinson noted that he presented the letter to Eddy and asked her if she would be willing to have her voice on a phonograph record. But she declined.¹

Another member of Eddy’s staff, John Salchow, noted in his reminiscence a third-hand account of Eddy declining to record her voice: “Mr. Joseph Mann once told me that Mr. Alfred Farlow had asked Mrs. Eddy to have her voice recorded and that she had said she did not care to as it would be of no interest to the world.” Salchow and Mann were groundskeepers, and Farlow was Committee on Publication for The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church).²

There are, however, numerous descriptions of Eddy’s voice, according to the reminiscences of people who met her. Mary Stewart, who also worked for Eddy, described it in a private interview as “colorful, firm, refined,” adding that “she talked with her lips, her eyes, her hands, and from her heart.”³ Calvin C. Hill, a Sunday School Superintendent of The Mother Church, wrote that Eddy gave an address with “a voice resonant with spiritual power and beauty, and with articulation so distinct that not a syllable was lost.”⁴

Multiple reminiscences imply that, in the addresses Eddy gave, she would adapt the tone of her voice to support the message she intended to convey. An account by Annie Louise Robertson, one of Eddy’s students, states that in addition to clear enunciation her voice “without effort, had the most unusual carrying power.”⁵ As a whole, students described her voice in terms of being varied, based on the import of the words she was speaking at the time.

According to Tomlinson, Eddy also appreciated music and “sang soprano in a little home quartet.” He went on to remark, “I well remember the sweet quality of her voice.”⁶