What is a wax cylinder record?
Wax cylinder records are the earliest commercial form of audio and music recording and storage methods. They predate CDs, vinyl records, and even 78 RPM shellac records. Wax cylinders were innovative as a recording medium because they both allowed the consumer to listen to prerecorded music and allowed for the consumer to record their own audio over the original recording. Wax cylinders are also unique in the sense that they’re one of the only forms of physical recording to not be a conventional disc shape, instead they took on the shape of a cylinder, like a can of soup. Wax cylinder could only store one song at a time, unlike later vinyl records which could store whole albums. It was impossible to produce a wax cylinder that could hold a whole album, so lots of musicians were limited by the standard recording time of around 2 minutes. Later cylinders known as amberols were able to hold 4 minutes of music due to a new type of needle used to play the cylinders on a phonograph and smaller grooves in the material.
What’s the history behind wax cylinders?
The history of wax cylinders begins in 1877 when Thomas Edison used his Phonograph invention to play sheets of tin foil wrapped around a metal cylinder with grooves. At the time tin foil wasn’t a viable recording medium to store music for a mass market, so the idea wasn’t developed much more until 1887. It was in 1887 when Alexander Graham Bell’s Dictaphone Company was working with the US Congress to test and improve the design of the Graphophone. After seeing a demonstration of the Graphophone Edison resumed his work on a commercially viable Phonograph model that could play cylinders made of wax instead of tin foil. Wax was chosen as a material because grooves could easily be sketched into the material by different types of needles, which allowed for the cylinders to be used and re-recorded over many times. Edison’s Phonograph and the Graphophone both became available in the commercial market in 1888. The first cylinder to ever be recorded was made on June 29, 1888, and was a performance of George Frideric Handel’s Israel in Egypt. Professionally made recordings of songs began to be made available in 1889, which typically feature performances of orchestras and small instrumental ensembles. The unique feature of cylinders being made of wax also allowed for cylinders to be reused and recorded over by consumers at home. These home recordings are often referred to as brown/black wax home recordings. The colors brown and black refer to the type of wax the cylinder is made of. Due to consumers being able to make their own recordings Phonographs typically came with an attachment that let the user record their own audio onto a cylinder at home. Initially the type of wax used to make cylinders was quite brittle and could easily wear down if the surface was rubbed too hard, which meant cylinders had to be held a special way to not be damaged. To hold a cylinder you must put your index finger and middle finger inside the hole of the cylinder and keep your other fingers off the surface where the grooves are located. Most wax cylinders were wax all throughout, which meant things like mold are common to find on wax cylinders due to their age. The packaging that cylinders came in was usually made of cardboard with a cotton lining inside to protect the surface grooves on the cylinder when being stored. Oftentimes a slip of paper containing the cylinder ID and song title/performers was included on top of the cylinder containers to tell consumers what they were buying. Brown wax cylinders were known to be quite fragile, only able to survive around 50 plays on a machine. It wasn’t until 1902 when a new moulding process was used to make cylinders that were harder and could survive more plays. This new line of cylinders were typically black in color and were harder than the brown wax cylinders. The line was known as Gold Moulded Cylinders due to the moulding process leaving behind a gold vapor due to gold electrons. These Gold Moulded records were sold in cardboard tubes with a cotton lining similar to the brown wax cylinder boxes, except pieces of paper containing the cylinder ID and song title didn’t need to be included anymore because the details were engraved on the top of the cylinder record itself. While black and brown wax cylinders were being made in the early 1900s a man named Thomas B Lambert was developing a cylinder that could be made of celluloid, which is an early type of plastic that is extremely durable. Lambert developed a way to mass produce and sell these celluloid cylinders in 1900. The records were originally cast in a bright pink, but were changed to a deep black color in 1903. This was due to the black dye reducing surface noise on the records. Celluloid cylinders were different from wax cylinders because they were extremely durable and unable to be shaved over, meaning home recordings could not be made out of them. Celluloid cylinders can survive hundreds of plays on a machine, and are actually as durable as vinyl records. One of the few problems that plagues celluloid cylinders, unlike wax cylinders, is that the plastic can shrink over time if not stored in proper conditions. Lambert continued to make these celluloid cylinders until his company went out of business in 1906 due to the Edison company repeatedly claiming they committed patent infringement, which ate up time and money. The Edison company basically harassed Lambert’s company until it went under to obtain the rights to make celluloid cylinders. The only problem was that Lambert owned the patent under his name, not his company. So the Edison company took time to develop a new system that used the same type of celluloid to make their own durable cylinders. In 1909 Edison debuted the Amberol brand, which was a line of cylinders that focused on the increased runtime of 4 minutes for songs. These new amberol cylinders, commonly known as just amberols, were initially produced in a black color similar to that of previous black wax cylinders. The Edison company continued to work towards acquiring Lambert’s patent, and in 1912 acquired the patent to produce celluloid cylinders. The Edison company immediately began producing celluloid cylinders with a plaster core and released them under the Amberol brand. These new cylinders came to be known as blue amberols due to a blue dye being used to color the cylinders. These blue amberols became the most durable form of physical storage of music and audio until the introduction of LP vinyls. Blue amberols became the last popular form of cylinder records, as they were made until the late 1920s and were faded out by shellac disc records, such as Edison Diamond Disc records. Late blue amberols were recorded by acoustically dubbing audio from Diamond Disc records to cylinders. The Edison company continued to produce cylinders until 1929, when the last cylinder was made in October.
Why should these old records be preserved anyway?
The preservation of wax cylinders is a vital part of preserving the history of music and especially the history of technological evolution. Wax cylinder recordings are extremely important because a lot of the equipment and technology used to play them and preserve them isn’t made anymore, so the limited amounts of people who work to preserve cylinders are running out of time and options to digitize and save important records. There are certain places that work to preserve these cylinders, such as the UCSB Cylinder Archive and the Edison Museum in New Jersey. These organizations work with private collectors and antique sellers to take old cylinders and use equipment to digitally store the audio and make them available to be listened to on the internet. Without these recordings that have been preserved we would have a very limited look into the culture of music during the very early 1900s. Preserving cylinders is also important because old home recordings of brown and black wax cylinders gives us a precious look into things like the lives and speech patterns of ordinary citizens who lived during the late Victorian era. Home recordings also have preserved lots of old religious prayers and monologues of people whose ideas would have never been preserved without cylinder records. Preserving these cylinders is a vital step in preserving a foggy period in time sandwiched between massive events and shifts in global politics.
Who’s involved in preserving these cylinders anyway?
One of the largest contributors in preserving cylinder records is the University of California Santa Barbara. UCSB is a public university in Santa Barbara which has a large online database that is free to access and allows users to explore cylinders that have been digitized. The cylinder catalogue they have stems from obscure home recordings all the way to professional recordings of orchestral pieces. UCSB also features a matrix archive of almost all historically significant physical recordings in the US. The UCSB archive is the best source for listening to and finding cylinders, and almost all of the cylinders are publicly available for free. Their website (http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/) also allows for users to donate money to help keep them running and operating their preservation efforts. The Edison Museum in New Jersey also focuses on preserving cylinder records, though they do not have a publicly available database akin to the UCSB archive. Private collectors also have resources to preserve cylinder records, though many cannot share them for internet users in the same way that UCSB can. Equipment to digitize and preserve cylinder records can cost up to $30,000. A device called an Archeophone is used to preserve cylinders and digitize the audio into a .wav format.
Who is still interested in these things, and why?
Lots of collectors who have private collections of physical records and antique technology are interested in collecting cylinders, though the market for them is extremely small. Cylinders aren’t hard to find and can be bought for around $10 on sites like Ebay, but the equipment used to play them is very expensive, so many people who collect things like vinyl records are deterred from collecting cylinders due to the high price of equipment.
Examples of wax cylinder song recordings:
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/detail.php?query_type=mms_id&query=990025416400203776&r=4&of=4
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/search.php?query_type=keyword&query=santa+claus+in+holland&nq=1
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/detail.php?query_type=mms_id&query=990026419250203776&r=1&of=6
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/detail.php?query_type=mms_id&query=990028607000203776&r=2&of=11
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/detail.php?query_type=mms_id&query=990025467520203776&r=3&of=9
Sources:
https://asa.scitation.org/action/doSearch?SeriesKey=jas&AllField=wax+cylinders&ConceptID=
https://www.cylinder.de/guide_black-wax-cylinders.html
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history.php
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history-tinfoil.php
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history-wax.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qDwz3JdD1c
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history-goldmoulded.php
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history-amberol.php
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/history-blueamberol.php
https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/resources/detail/432
