In this paper we compute the emission coming from the direct recombination of free electrons to a given shell ( n \geq 2 ) during the epoch of cosmological hydrogen recombination .
This contribution leads to a total of one photon per recombined hydrogen atom and therefore a \sim 30 - 88 \% increase of the recombination spectrum within the frequency range 1 \text { GHz } \leq \nu \leq 100 \text { GHz } .
In particular the Balmer-continuum emission increases the distortion at \nu \sim 690 GHz by \sim 92 \% .
With our 100 shell calculations for the hydrogen atom we find that a total of \sim 5 photons per hydrogen atom are emitted when including all the bound-bound transitions , the 2s two-photon decay channel and the optically thin free-bound transitions .
Since the direct recombination continuum at high n is very broad only a few n -series continuua are distinguishable and most of this additional emission below \nu \lesssim 30 GHz is completely featureless .