Thomas Alva Edison was a man of many talents and many times his inventions were able to completely redefine entire industries and society as it was previously known. And sometimes he was stubborn in his ways and other times outright ruthless when it came to having his way and preventing his ideas from being washed over by something better. Arguable the most infamous of such examples was his invention of the electric chair, which he designed using alternating current instead of direct current. Edison advocated DC over AC in any industrial or domestic application as being safer. To subtly get his point across, he referred to his new method of execution as to “Westinghouse someone.” He had hoped that his invention would discredit George Westinghouse, who at the end prevailed with alternating current flowing through most of our homes today.
One of Edison's more peaceful accomplishments was the invention of the first phonograph. This was the very earliest commercial medium to record and reproduce sound. While the medium was referred to as “records” it was nothing like the shellac and later vinyl discs we came to know about after 1910.
Thomas Edison invention dates back to 1877 and the work was done in secrecy at his offices at Western Union: A piece of tinfoil was wrapped around a rigid cylinder with a spiral groove. During the recording process the stylus, which was moved by a mechanical membrane, dented the tinfoil within the groove and encoded sound. In the first version, the machine was hand cranked both during recording and playback leading to what should have been expected shifts in frequency due to operator variability. While the invention is dated July of 1877, the first mildly intelligible squeaks from the contraption were documented in December of that year.
Without a clear vision of how to make money from this, Edison seems to have at least temporarily given up on or at least set the project aside. He was probably somewhat busy trying thousands of filaments to invent electric light, another entirely fun undertaking.
Meanwhile this left the field wide open for other visionaries like the Volta Laboratory, Charles Sumner Tainter, Alexander Graham Bell and Chichester Bell who jointly presented a functional “Graphophone” system which was mainly intended to record speech on disposable cardboard cylinders coated with wax.
By 1889 pre-recorded cylinders with about 3 minutes of music, comedy skits and such were sold mainly to pub owners and other public establishments who bought the rather expensive machines as novelty items. Many of these machines had special attachments to not only playback sound, but to also record it. The wax layer on the cylinder was therefore relatively thick and could be shaved down for rerecording without discarding the cylinder.
By 1902 Edison got interested in the project again and launched Edison Records. This company offered a vastly improved wax coating that allowed recordings up to 100 times over.
While increasingly popular prior to WW1, the cylindrical records eventually lost commercial favor to the much more storable and durable Shellac discs and were virtually extinct by 1910.
Maybe wax cylinders will make a comeback some day like vinyl has over the last few years. I am sure there is a loyal following that feels that that special waxy sound just simply cannot be matched by modern technology.
Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes audiophile quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time he blogs about all things related to sound, music and audio.
