Phonograph cylinder

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Edison "Blue Amberol" roller on a Columbia BK Jewel Phonograph.
The American military march The Liberty Bell , played by the New York Military Band, recorded by phonograph in 1911

The phonograph cylinder , also called the phonograph cylinder , was a medium for sound recording, which was invented in 1885 by Chichester Alexander Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter during the further development of the Edison phonograph and adopted in 1887 by Thomas Alva Edison for his improved phonograph .

development

Bell and Tainter

After Thomas Alva Edison temporarily stopped developing his phonograph because the research effort was too high in relation to the financial return, Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter began developing the Edison phonograph in the Alexander Graham Bell- funded Volta Laboratory . Her main focus here was on improving the recording and playback quality of the speaking machine, later called the Graphophon .

The invented by Edison tin foil phonograph ( Tin Foil phonograph ) wrote the mechanically transformed sound waves only incompletely, in points and ovals to a spanned with a tin foil to itself rotating cylinder made of metal, resulting in a messy, afflicted with severe background noise reproduction led. Taking up this problem, Bell and Tainter experimented, among other things, with sound carriers, the core of which consisted of several strips of paper (later made of cardboard) and were coated with a layer of wax. The main advantage of this material was that the previously incomplete recorded sound waves were now completely written into the sound carrier evenly and without interruption, similar to a lathe, which resulted in a considerable improvement in the sound reproduction. The patent for the wax cylinder with a cardboard core was granted on May 4, 1886, at the same time as the graphophone was patented.

Henri Lioret

Lioret cylinder

The French watchmaker and inventor Henrie Lioret developed a small celluloid cylinder for use in a talking doll in 1893 and, five years later, in 1897, a sound carrier that differed considerably in its construction from the current models. Its rollers consisted of a brass tube with spokes, covered by a sleeve made of celluloid , a durable material that was first used for the purpose of reproducing sound signals. The same applies to the replication of the celluloid rollers by means of molding . Around 1890, there were a wide variety of roller types, with regard to their shape and size, which could be played on the associated clockwork phonograph.

Edison

After Edison had rejected an offer of cooperation from Bell and Tainter regarding the further development of the roller player, he began to further develop his phonograph ( Improved Phonograph) and took over Bell and Tainter's idea of ​​using wax as a recording medium. His main focus was on improving the copying process and the manufacturing process.

Initially, the reels intended for sale were played directly by the various artists by positioning several speaking machines next to each other and starting the sound carriers in parallel for the recording. This individual procedure led to considerable costs, so that Edison soon began to look for methods that would replace this procedure. Duplicating machines already existed with which a larger number of rollers could be reproduced by rotating a recorded roller at the same speed as the empty roller that was still to be recorded and transmitting the sound waves by means of a lever system. However, these devices were unable to meet the increasing demand for sound recording.

Edison therefore, after many attempts, in 1902 devised a method of duplication, which is in part still used in today's record production, namely the electroplating of the main sound carrier. For this purpose, a master was placed in a vacuum chamber between two electrodes made of gold leaf to which a high voltage was applied. The resulting arc tore off the finest pieces of gold from the electrodes, which settled on the roller rotating at a constant speed and adhered there. As a result, a fine coating of gold was created which, now electrically conductive, could be subjected to further galvanic processing. The wax original was removed and the remaining matrix, encased in a brass tube, was dipped in liquid wax. If the matrix was then pulled out of the wax again, depending on the temperature difference between the matrix and the wax, a wax layer of varying thickness, controllable in its thickness, was deposited on the metal. The die itself could easily be detached from the roller copy because of the different expansion coefficients of metal and wax. These sound carriers, known as chill cast rolls or gold cast rolls, could now be put on sale in the right shape.

Donut

After the development of the more durable and less space-consuming shellac record by the German-born American inventor Emil Berliner , the wax roller no longer had a future, which was expressed in the slow but steady decline in the sales figures for the rollers. The main advantage of the record was its easy reproducibility and the second side used from 1904 onwards. In the summer of 1929 gave Thomas Edison the last of since 1912 from celluloid made Blue Amberol Records rolls out and ended a few days before the stock market crash in the United States, its involvement in the field of sound recording.

Recording and playback technology

Recording roller player.
Play reel player.

The recording was made via a funnel which conducted the sound onto a membrane equipped with a sharp-edged burin and engraved the sound vibrations as alternately shallower and deeper grooves ( lettering ) in the wax of the rotating roller. On the other hand, the wax roller rotating at the same speed was scanned by a hemispherical sapphire during playback, and the vibrations mechanically transmitted from the sapphire to a membrane in a sound box were made audible via hoses or horns.

It should be noted that the sound box in devices with the ability to record and play back was moved forward via a mechanical device, also called a spindle, in order to enable the first cutting of a sound groove. Later simple reel players, which were only used for reproduction, no longer had a spindle. The tone groove itself was now used to propel the sound box.

Roll material

A wide variety of materials were used to manufacture the wax rollers, depending on the company and the level of technical development. For example, stearin and caustic soda were added to the wax as a carrier in various proportions , thereby controlling the properties of the hardness or softness of the sound carrier. As wax carrier found beeswax , chemical wax, Cerea wax, palm wax and many more varieties their application. Furthermore, different substances were added to the roller compound depending on the country of manufacture. The first rollers from France were made of Kanauba wax with soda soap . The US rollers, on the other hand, consisted of stearic acid soaps, sodium stearate, lead stearate and various types of wax.

Roller formats

Bell and Tainter

  • 1885: paper cylinder with wax coating . First version 9 inches (229 millimeters) long and 2 inches (51 millimeters) in diameter coated with a wax mixture of 1/4 inch (6.35 millimeters) and a playing time of 10 minutes with a distance of the grooves of 1/250 inches ( 0.1 millimeter) or 120 grooves per inch. Second version 6 inches (152 millimeters) long and 1.375 inches (35 millimeters) in diameter with 150 grooves per inch.

Henri Lioret

  • 1893: Celluloid cylinders that rotated at a speed of 100–120 / min and, depending on the model, had a playing time of 30 seconds to 4 minutes. The color of the labels shows the type of music played: blue for songs, orange for instrumental pieces, red for fanfares, green for harmonies, gray for hymns. The sales of the rollers ended around 1900.

Edison

  • 1895: Edison Records - Brown Wax Cylinders , with which the first commercial sound recordings found their distribution. The speed of rotation was usually 120 and 160 / min. The playing time was just over two minutes. The rollers were manufactured and sold well into 1901.
  • 1898: Concert Record - Brown Wax cylinder with a diameter of 5 inches (127 millimeters) and changing rotational speeds, which were initially 120 / min, then 144 / min and finally 160 / min. In terms of volume and playback quality, this type of roller brought about a considerable increase. The sale ended in 1904.
  • 1902: Gold Molded Record , chilled cast rollers or gold cast rollers, the first wax roller industrially manufactured by Edison with a rotation frequency of 160 / min and a running time of two minutes. A disadvantage was the increased fragility due to the material used. The end of production of this type of roller dates back to 1912.
  • 1908: Amberol Record , wax roller with a playing time of four minutes, which was not compatible with the roller players commercially available up to that time, because the sound grooves were smaller and were closer together. The playback devices required their own sound boxes, their lead screw a different pitch. Soon, however, phonographs with switchable sound boxes and spindle mechanisms were also commercially available, which could play both the old and the new roller type. The production of the "wax amberols" ended in 1912.
  • 1912: Blue Amberol Records , the last type of roller manufactured and sold by Edison with the same dimensions as the previous one, but now made of celluloid and thus provided with a supposedly higher durability, which, however, was not confirmed in the long term. The playing time was like the previous model with 4 minutes. The last rollers went on sale in 1929.

Other roller formats

Due to the large number of roller manufacturers and the types of rollers they manufacture and sell, it is almost impossible to cover all of them. The following list is intended to give a brief overview of the diversity of the range of phonograph cylinders available at that time, which of course cannot claim to be complete.

  • Columbia Phonograph Company
  • Busy bee
  • Indestructible Records
  • US Everlasting
  • Lambert
  • Pathé
  • Edison Bell
  • sterling

literature

Web links

Commons : Wax Rollers  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Chichester Bell, Charles Sumner Tainter: Recording and Reproducing Speech and Other Sounds. May 4, 1886, accessed June 11, 2017 .
  2. ↑ UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive: Lioret Cylinders (1893–1900). Retrieved June 14, 2017 (English).
  3. ↑ USCB Cylinder Audio Archive: Brown Wax Cylinders (1895–1901). Retrieved June 15, 2017 .
  4. ↑ UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive: Concert Cylinders of the Brown Wax Era. Retrieved June 15, 2017 .
  5. ↑ UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive: Edison Gold-Molded Cylinders (1902–1912). Retrieved June 15, 2017 .
  6. ↑ USCB Cylinder Audio Archive: Edison Amberol Cylinders (1908–1912). Retrieved June 12, 2017 (English).
  7. ↑ UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive: Edison Blue Amberol Cylinders (1912–1929). Retrieved June 15, 2017 .