![]() Edison’s Phonograph and the Graphophone both became available in the commercial market in 1888. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Wax cylinder could only store one song at a time, unlike later vinyl records which could store whole albums. 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 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. They predate CDs, vinyl records, and even 78 RPM shellac records. ![]() ![]() Wax cylinder records are the earliest commercial form of audio and music recording and storage methods.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |